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^^r^ LIBRARY OF CONGRESS.^! 



RECOLLECTIONS 




y^.-ff.&r^-r^r. 



RECOLLECTIONS 

PERSONAL AND LITERARY 
By RICHARD HENRY STODDARD 

^^/V^^^y RIPLEY HITCHCOCK • With an Intro- 
duction by Y.DMU'^D CLARENCE STEDMAN 

KUustratrtr 




00 O J o . 



NEPF rORK ■ A. S. BARNES AND 
CO MPANY • M D C C C C I I I 



^ 



THE LIBRARY GF 
. CONGRESS, 

Two Copies Received 

OCT 13 1903 

m Copyright Entry 

cuss •• xA No. 

COPY A. 



75 2-13? 

.A3 



^ti 



Copyright, igoj 
By a. S. Barnes and Company 



Published October, 1903 



UNIVERSITY PRESS • JOHN WILSON 
AND SON • CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A. 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

LIVING as he did through several distinct 
periods of American Hterary history, Mr. 
■ Stoddard's recollections inevitably repre- 
sented a range and a richness which made their 
preservation essential. His peculiar modesty, 
which was realised best by those associated with 
him most closely, led him to debate the question ; 
but in the end he, too, acquiesced in the opin- 
ion of others who knew the interest and per- 
manent value of his varied experience and fruitful 
associations. The preparation of this volume be- 
gan some seven years ago. There were certain 
periods of his life which he had already dealt with, 
and other chapters were added from time to time. 
In the spring of the current year the book was 
ready for the press. Then there came to him the 
end, which he had awaited so patiently and bravely, 
and this volume of the poet's recollections appears 
as in a sense a memorial. Since the infirm health 
of his latest years, and his death before the book 
was actually in type, rendered assistance necessary, 
it may be said at once that there may be some 
errors which he would have detected, and for such 

V 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

errors the responsibility is mine. In order to make 
this clear, my name appears in connection with 
Mr. Stoddard's book simply that the author may 
not be held to account for possible minor errata 
which he would have remedied could he have read 
the proofs. 

Very fortunately the later preparation of Mr. 
Stoddard's ** Recollections " has been aided by 
the wise counsel of his closest friend, Edmund 
Clarence Stedman. I desire also to express my 
deep obligation to Mrs. Ellen Douglas Stedman 
for her invaluable aid in the final revision of the 
manuscript and in reading the proofs. It is a 
pleasure to acknowledge in behalf of Mr. Stod- 
dard's friends and readers the courtesy of Messrs. 
Harper & Brothers, Houghton, Mifflin & Co., the 
J. B. Lippincott Co., the Lothrop Publishing Co., 
and Henry T. Coates & Co., for their very cordial 
assent to Mr. Stoddard's request for permission to 
make use of portions of his contributions to Har- 
pe/s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Lippincotf s 
Magazine, Poets' Homes, and the Era. 

It was within less than two years before Mr. 
Stoddard's death that some admirable photo- 
graphs of the poet and of Mrs. Stoddard were 
obtained in his own study by the Authors Club. 
For the reproduction of these photographs and 
for the facilities which were afforded in photo- 
graphing manuscripts, letters, and pictures from 
the rare collection presented to the club by Mr. 
Stoddard, I wish to offer a becoming acknowledg- 

vi 



EDITOR'S NOTE 

ment. The greater number of the Hterary treas- 
ures thus reproduced under Mr. Stoddard's personal 
direction appear as illustrations of the limited 
large-paper edition of the " Recollections," which 
has been prepared in response to the suggestions 
of his friends and of many bibliophiles. 

In view of Mr. Stoddard's death, the use of 
portraits, and the addition of a brief account of the 
ending of a life so rich in achievement, have been 
essential to the completeness of a volume which 
necessarily becomes not only an autobiography 
and in part an intimate hterary history of our 
country for more than threescore years, but also, 
as I have said, in some degree, a memorial. 

R. H. 



vn 



INTRODUCTION 

IT was in the order of things, and hardly cause for 
blame, that New York, even after her provincial 
years, was compelled during so long a period 
to be, as De Quincey said of Oxford Street, a 
stony-hearted mother to her bookmen and poets. 
She had, in truth, few posts for them and little of 
a market. Her colleges had not the means, if 
they had the will, to utilise their talents and ac- 
quirements. We do owe to her newspapers and 
magazines, — and now and then to the traditional 
liking of Uncle Sam for his bookish offspring, — that 
more writers did not fall by the way, even in that 
arid time succeeding the Civil War, when we learned 
that letters were foregone, not only inter arma, but 
a long while afterward. Those were the days when 
English went untaught, and when publishers were 
more afraid of poetry than they now are of verse. 
Yet Mr. Stoddard was able to live through it all, 
and he lived to see a changed condition, to the 
evolution of which he contributed his full share. 

For all this, he began long enough ago to have 
had his early poetry refused by Poe, because it was 
too good to be the work of an obscure stripling, and 
to have had Hawthorne for his sponsor and friend. 

ix 



INTRODUCTION 

His youth showed again how much more inborn 
tendency has to do with one's Hfe than any exter- 
nal forces, — such as guardianship, means, and 
what we call education. The thrush takes to the 
bough, wheresoever hatched and fledged. Many 
waters cannot quench genius, neither can the floods 
drown it. 

The story of Dickens's boyhood, as told by him- 
self, is not more pathetic, nor is its outcome more 
beautiful, than the story of Richard Henry Stod- 
dard's experiences, — his orphanage, his few years' 
meagre schooling, his work as a boy in all sorts of 
shifting occupations, the attempt to make a learned 
blacksmith of him, his final apprenticeship to iron- 
moulding, at which he worked on the East Side 
from his eighteenth to his twenty-first year. As Dr. 
Griswold put it, he began to mould his thoughts 
into the symmetry of verse while he moulded the 
molten metal into shapes of grace. Stoddard, how- 
ever, afterward said that a knowledge of foundries 
was not one of the learned doctor's strong points. 

Yet the young artisan somehow got hold of 
books, and not only made poetry, but succeeded 
in showing it to such magnates as Park Benjamin 
and Willis. The kindly Willis said that he had 
brains enough to make a reputation, but that 
" writing was hard work to do, and ill paid when 
done." But the youth was bound to take the road 
to Arcady. He asked for nothing better than this 
ill-paid craft. His passion for it, doubtless, was 
strengthened by his physical toil and uncongenial 

X 



INTRODUCTION 

.surroundings. For one, I am not surprised that 
much of his early verse, which is still retained in 
his works, breathes the spirit of Keats, though 
where and how our strayed singer came to study 
that most perfect and delicate of masters none but 
himselfcould tell. The fact remains that he, some- 
how, also left his moulding and trusted to his pen. 
To use his own words, he " set resolutely to work 
to learn the only trade for which he seemed fitted 
— that of literature." 

From that time to his death, over a half-century, 
he clung to it. Never in his worst seasons did 
he stop to think how the world treated him, or 
that he was entitled to special providences. He 
accepted poverty or good luck with an equal mind, 
content with the reward of being a reader, a writer, 
and, above all, a poet. He managed not to loaf, 
and yet to invite his soul ; and his songs are evi- 
dence that the invitation was accepted. If to 
labour is to pray, his industry was a religion; for I 
doubt if there was a day in all these years when, 
unless disabled bodily, he did not work at his 
trade. 

We all know with what results. He earned a 
manly living from the first, and therewithal steadily 
contributed a vital portion to the current and to 
the enduring literature of his land and language. 
There was one thing that characterised the some- 
what isolated New York group of young writers in 
his early manhood, especially himself and his near- 
est associates, such as Taylor and Boker, and, 

xi 



INTRODUCTION 

later, Aldrich and Winter. They called themselves 
squires of poesy, in their romantic way, but they 
had neither the arrogance nor the chances for a 
self-heralding, more common in these chipper 
modern days. They seem to have followed their 
art because they adored it, quite as much as for 
what it could do for them. 

Of Stoddard it may be said that in his prime 
there were few important literary names and enter- 
prises, North or South, but he was **of the com- 
pany." If he found friends in youth, he abundantly 
repaid his debt in helpful counsel to his juniors, 
among whom I was one of the eldest and most 
grateful. But I cannot realise that over forty years 
of our close friendship have passed since I showed 
my early work to him, and he took me to a pub- 
lisher. I then had never known a mind so stored 
with bookish lore, so intimate with the lives of rare 
poets gone by; yet to what it then possessed, that 
avid reader, with his wonderful memory, was ever 
adding " under the evening lamp." 

If his earlier verse was like Keats, how soon he 
came to that unmistakable style of his own — to the 
utterance of those pure lyrics, " most musical, most 
melancholy " — to the perfection of his match- 
less songs, and, again, to the mastery of blank 
verse, that noblest measure, in " The Fisher and 
Charon" — to the grace and Hmpid, narrative verse 
of " The King's Bell," to the feeling, wisdom — 
above all, to the imagination — of his loftier odes, 
among which that on Lincoln remains unsurpassed. 

xii 



INTRODUCTION 

This is not the place to eulogise such work. But 
one thing may be noted in the progress of what 
in Berkeley's phrase may be called the planting 
of arts and letters in America. Stoddard and 
his group were the first after Poe to make poetry 
— whatever else it might be — the rhythmical cre- 
ation of beauty. As an outcome of this, and in 
distinction from the poetry of conviction to which 
the New England group were so addicted, look at 
the ** Songs of Summer," which our New York poet 
brought out in 1857. For beauty pure and simple 
it still seems to me fresher and more significant 
than any single volume produced up to that date by 
any down-East poet save Emerson. It was " poetry 
or nothing," and though it came out of time in that 
stormy period, it had to do with the making of 
new poets thereafter. 

In conclusion, I am moved to say, very much as 
I wrote on his seventieth birthday, that our poet's 
laborious and nobly independent life, with all its 
lights and shadows, was one to be envied. There 
is much in completeness — its rainbow has not 
been dissevered — it is a perfect arc. As I knew 
him, it was the absolute realisation of his young 
desire, the unhasting, unresting life of a poet and 
student, beyond that of any other writer among us. 
Its compensations were greater than those of ease 
and wealth. He had the happiness to win in youth 
the one woman he loved, with the power of whose 
singular and forceful genius his own has been insep- 
arably allied. These wedded poets were blessed 
xiii 



INTRODUCTION 

in their children, in the exquisite memory of one, 
in the loyalty of another who lived a life too brief, 
yet long enough to win success. His comrades 
were such as he pictured to his hope in youth — 
poets, scholars, artists of the beautiful, with whom 
he " warmed both hands before the fire of life." 
None of them was a more patient worker or more 
loved his work. To it he gave his years, whether 
waxing or waning; he surrendered for it the 
strength of his right hand ; he yielded the light 
of his eyes, and complained not, nor had need 
to, " for so were Milton and Maeonides." 

E. C. S. 



XIV 



CONTENTS 



Page 

I. A New England Childhood i 

II. New York in 1835 17 

III. My First Literary Acquaintances . . 30 

IV. The New World and the Knickerbocker 

Magazine 42 

V. My Friend, Bayard Taylor 50 

VI. Influence of N. P. Willis 68 

VII. At Lowell's Fireside 89 

VIII. Early Life of Elizabeth Barstow, Our 

Courtship and Marriage 106 

IX. My Acquaintance with Hawthorne . . 116 

X. Life in the Custom-House 134 

XI. Meetings with Foe 145 

XII. Earlier New York Writers 161 

XIII. BoKER and his Letters 180 

XIV. Read's Home at Bordentown .... 201 
XV. Glimpses of Thackeray 213 

XVI. The Author of Thanatopsis 226 

XV 



CONTENTS 

XVII. Taylor's Return to his Friends 

XVIII. "This Likable Young Poet" . 

XIX. Some Letters from Longfellow 

XX. Whittier's Seventieth Birthday 

XXI. Our Home in Fifteenth Street 

XXII. The Last Years 



Appendix. — Mr. Stoddard's Bibliography 
Index 



Page 
244 

261 

270 
285 
295 
305 

321 

325 



XVI 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

*R. H. Stoddard Frontispiece 

Manuscript of a Poem by Burns . . . Facing page 31 

Portrait of Mr. Stoddard in Early Manhood „ „ 112 
Last page of a Letter from Poe to F. W. 

Thomas, dated Sept. 12, 1842 . . . „ „ 153 
Thackeray's Portrait and Autograph Poem 
which hung above Mr. Stoddard's desk 

for many years „ „ 214 

*R. H. Stoddard — Elizabeth Stoddard . . „ „ 300 

* From photographs by Rockwood taken for the Authors Club in 1902. 



XVll 



RECOLLECTI ONS 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

SAILORS' blood is strong in me. 
Whence my ancestors came I know 
not positively. One account places 
them at Liddesdale, Scotland, another some- 
where in Yorkshire. I first find them at 
Hingham, Massachusetts, in 1638. My 
father's father, Ichabod, sailed from Hing- 
ham to coastwise ports for many years. 
He had three sons, — Ichabod, Martin, and 
Reuben, — who followed the sea, which was 
" the wild and wandering grave " of the last 
two. Reuben, my father, was a remarkable 
man. He determined not to grow up in 
ignorance, as his father had done, and his 
brothers were doing, but to have an edu- 
I I 



RECOLLECTIONS 

cation, cost what it would. He obtained 
his time of his father, who, according to 
the usage of the early nineteenth century, 
had a right to it until he was twenty-one, 
and ran in debt for his schooling, which was 
practical rather than profound. As a sailor 
he rose from grade to grade until he became 
master of the brig " Royal Arch," a model 
of which hung over the door of the ship- 
ping firm of which he afterward became a 
partner. 

About this time my father became the 
master and owner of a gallant little craft 
named Sophia Gurney. Where he met 
Miss Gurney the Historic Muse does not 
relate. She was one of a family of at least 
four sons and four daughters, and was born 
at Abington, Massachusetts, about ten miles 
south of Hingham. She was remarkably 
beautiful, and tolerably ignorant. Her father, 
Thomas Gurney, was a man who had seen 
better days at one time or another; but 
eight strapping children, with scriptural and 
sylvan names, by his first wife, and three 
more by his second wife, prevented his 
rising in the world. 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

Three children were born to my parents, 
— a son Charles, a daughter Mary, and my- 
self. When I was two or three years old 
my father sailed for Gothenburg, — on the 
"Royal Arch," — and was never heard of 
afterward ; it was supposed that his ship 
was destroyed by an iceberg, the season 
being that of the great southward drift of 
icebergs. So my young mother was left a 
widow, with three little children to take care 
of. She was ill, but she rose from her bed, 
like the resolute woman she was, and began 
her life of widowhood. It was a trao^ic one, 
for two of her children died, and by some 
hocus-pocus, which she never understood, 
she was cheated out of my father's share of 
the " fatal and perfidious bark " in which he 
was lost. My mother's father was too poor 
to help her, but she found a home In the 
house of my father's father, where she de- 
voted herself to my education. 

I remember everything distinctly in and 
about Hingham as It was in my childhood, 
though I have not seen the place in many 
years. I was living there when the " Old 
Colony House " was built, and I can sec the 

3 



RECOLLECTIONS 

road which led from it down to a bridge, 
near which stood a grist-mill, from which I 
often fancied I saw little drifts of flour float- 
ing out on the wind. And I remember the 
little cove through which the tide rushed 
to and fro twice a day. I think pond-lilies 
grew in the marshes near its banks. On the 
lower side of the cove, or the stream which 
emptied into it, stood my grandfather's 
house, the street running up and down the 
gentle slopes of the banks, and lined on 
either side with gardens, in which I remem- 
ber the tall poles festooned with bean-vines, 
and the rows of corn almost as tall. 

The front of my grandfather's house was 
at the level of the street, but the back 
dropped downward two stories on the slope 
toward the cove. There was a fan-light over 
the front door and two little windows to 
the parlour. In the rear of one of the lower 
stories I can see myself, a boy of five or 
six years, sitting on a little stool at my 
mother's frock. She was of melancholy 
temperament, as may be inferred from the 
hymn which she frequently sang to me at 
nightfall, — 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

"The day is past and gone, 

The evening shades appear : 
Oh ! may we all remember well, 
The night of death draws near." 

There were other even-songs no less cheer- 
ful. Indeed, I learned so to hate the hymns 
of Dr. Watts that I vented my feelings by 
often scratching the black cover of the hymn- 
book with a sharp pin. Near this detested 
volume lay two booklets, one of which was 
quite enjoyable, for it was a treatise on ball- 
playing, archery, and other English games; 
but the other was full of pictorial caricatures 
of everything human, consisting of tortured 
hearts in and out of which devils were danc- 
ing. I suppose this book had been designed 
to warn sinners of the doom that awaited 
them, but I cannot remember that it did 
more for me than to make me long to kill 
its author. 

In winter, when the ice was thick, my 
grandfather often carried me across the 
frozen cove and up the hill on the opposite 
shore, where slept "the rude forefathers of 
the hamlet," most of them under tottering 
headstones. Here also was Dr. Richard- 

5 



RECOLLECTIONS 

son's church, as it was then called, with 
its high-backed pews, — one of the oldest 
churches in New England. That old ceme- 
tery seemed to be looked forward to as the 
certain and probably sudden home of all of 
us; and I was not excluded from the gen- 
eral gathering, as I learned one day when 
I was sick and heard instructions to bans: 
a handkerchief in the window to inform 
my grandfather when I had died. There 
was no special arrangement for notifying 
the dear old man that I still lived ; dying 
seemed to be the most laudable industry 
of the time. 

Opposite our house was a building that in 
those days seemed to me a stately mansion. 
It was the home of a Squire Lincoln, who, I 
believe, was a descendant of the revolution- 
ary general of the same name, a favourite 
of Washington, and consequently hated by 
Gates, and afterward by Benedict Arnold 
and all other disloyal Americans. Poor 
Washington ! He thought it strange that 
there could be any one hostile to the repub- 
lic. Imagine him now alive, and contem- 
plating the doings of the rings in various 

6 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

cities, and all the other political thieves and 
scoundrels ! 

I was considered clever, — a show child, 
who was expected to speak a piece when 
called upon, and who was pointed out among 
the towns-people as " Reuben s boy." My 
uncles were kind to me, and my grandfather 
was fond of me. As a treat I was once al- 
lowed to accompany him to Cohasset, where 
a hotel was being built, and, as a greater 
treat, I was permitted to go to Boston with 
him on his schooner. 

Restless and unhappy, and lonely wherever 
she was, my mother had a habit of visiting 
her relatives, — a dangerous habit, which in- 
creased with her years, and of which I had 
my first fruits in a short sojourn at Abington, 
where her father resided. It was a pleasant 
country town, the inhabitants of which, rich 
and poor alike, were neighbourly, calling each 
other by their Christian names, which, when 
first heard, seemed to imply family relation- 
ship. I remember the popular name of an 
elderly lady, whom I never saw, who was 
known as Aunt Gannett. My grandfather 
Gurney was called Deacon Gurney, though 

7 



RECOLLECTIONS 

he never, I think, crossed the threshold of 
any church. He was an old man, grey- 
headed and decrepit, as was also his wife, 
who was his second wife. There was a tra- 
dition in the family that he had impoverished 
himself by his fondness for fast horses ; he 
was worse than impoverished at this time by 
his love of horseflesh, for he continued to 
have horses — one at a time, however, which 
he always succeeded in swapping for other 
and leaner horses, and whatever he could 
wring out of his last victim in the shape 
of "boot." 

He was a kindly, gentle-hearted old crea- 
ture, and he earned his subsistence by act- 
ing as a common carrier for his neighbours ; 
for he had a large waggon, — an ancient hay- 
cart, I should say, for I recollect riding in it, 
on top of a load of hay which was straight- 
way tossed into the loft of his own little 
barn, where I was nearly smothered. Like 
most children, I was fond of playing in the 
hay-mow, the stuffy atmosphere of which 
was strangely odorous to me. This barn 
stood directly opposite his house, which I 
believe had once also been a barn. It was a 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

poor old tumble-down building, with a door 
at one end, two windows in front, and a little 
shoe-shop on the left-hand side of the door. 
He had two sons, who followed that indoor 
industry which was prevalent throughout the 
country towns of New England at that time, 
— the making of shoes. 

Books were very scarce then, even in 
houses of the wealthy, and newspapers a 
luxury in which few indulged. I never saw 
a newspaper at my grandfather Stoddard's, 
and only one at my grandfather Gurney's — 
an odd copy of some Boston weekly, of a 
literary character. Besides these, I recall 
nothing that suggested the flight of time 
except two copies of old Isaiah Thomas's 
Almanac for 1802 and 1804. To this litera- 
ture should be added a tract about Paul and 
Onesimus, a worn-out copy of ^sop's Fables, 
with rude woodcuts, which would be worth 
their weight in gold now, as examples of 
early American engraving. 

I had my first glimpse of school life in 
Abington, in a roughly shingled, shed- like 
structure, which stood on the main road, 
about three-quarters of a mile away. It was, 

9 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I suppose, a " Boys' and Girls' School," its 
single teacher being a pleasant, bright-eyed 
young woman, named Richmond. I learned 
nothing there from any educational book, if 
any such existed then, and writing was one 
of its untaught branches. I never saw a 
pen or an ink-bottle there, nor even a slate 
or a pencil. 

It was an enjoyable though stifling place, 
but as a daily occurrence every forenoon, 
we had what was known as the " recess," — 
an out-of-door play-time of a quarter of an 
hour. I recall no girlish scholars, my re- 
membrance hovering over the corner of the 
desk where I sat, and not far away a wooden 
pail of tepid water, and a large tin dipper. 

I went to and returned from this rustic 
academy alone, twice a day, — creeping 
snail-like along the dusty road as unwillingly 
as the school-boy of whom the melancholy 
Jaques tells us. I was also made to pick 
berries, — a task which was distasteful to me, 
the berry-pastures were so far off, and the 
berries themselves so scanty, and so prone 
to find their way into my mouth rather than 
into the tin pail which I was expected to 

10 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

fill before returning. The only pleasures of 
memory that I attach to Abington are the 
strolls which I took in woods that have since 
disappeared, the playing at work when the 
hay was being stacked in the meadows, and 
the ride to the barn. 

I remember to have spent two summers 
and at least one winter there, and that the 
towns-people were frightened by a transit of 
Venus, or Mercury, or some other astronomi- 
cal occurrence, which they thought portended 
the end of the world! I had no playmates 
or companions, — but indeed the same social 
condition existed for me in Hingham. 

My mother's relatives, who were as poor 
as herself, moved nomadically from factory 
town to factory town, and she frequently 
accompanied them with me. I still have 
kaleidoscopic glimpses of Taunton, Valley 
Falls, and Providence; glimpses of factory 
interiors, of carding-rooms, spinning-rooms, 
weaving-rooms, and mule-rooms ; the slip- 
ping of leather bands over revolving wheels, 
the whizzing of spindles, — clatter, clatter, 
clatter. Mixed with these are glimpses of 
Scituate, Bridgewatcr, and Braintree. 

u 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Something must have gone wrong with 
my mother at this time, for she whisked me 
off with her to Boston. What caused this 
sudden flight of hers, or indeed any of her 
subsequent movements, which were generally 
unexpected, I know not. I was not curious, 
and she not communicative ; it was always 
up and away with her. The Boston of that 
day was lesser, and less pretentious than the 
Boston of to-day. 

We planted ourselves at the old North 
End, in a narrow street, which must have 
antedated the Revolution. It was named 
after the royal family which occupied the 
British throne at that period, and it skirted, 
or was near, a great burying-ground on a 
hill-side, where many of the loyal subjects 
of this family were interred. I recollect 
playing with other boys among their crum- 
bling, leaning, slate headstones, and clamber- 
ing over the vaults whence they would not 
emerge until the sounding of the last trump. 
The head of Hanover Street, where we lived, 
was within a stone's throw of the Chelsea 
Ferry, between which and ourselves ran a 
double street, — that is to say, a street with 

12 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

. two names, one being Ann, the other Com- 
mercial. There were shipyards in the neigh- 
bourhood, wherein I used to run among the 
logs, in danger occasionally of falling be- 
tween -them, or of slipping on their slimy 
surfaces. 

This migration to Boston proved a melan- 
choly one for the pale country widow and 
her delicate son. He continued the school- 
ing which he missed at Abington, and added 
to his scanty stock of reading by borrowing 
books, one of which, entitled " The Three 
Spaniards," enchanted him with its mysteries 
and its horrors. He must also have looked 
into " McFingal," that Hudibrastic tedious- 
ness, the opening lines of which still stick in 
his memory : 

" When Yankees skilled in martial rule, 
First put the British troops to school." 

Here he had a severe attack of rheumatism, 
which rendered him so utterly helpless that 
his mother had to lift him in and out of bed, 
and to waste her days and nights in slop-work, 
for the tailors who supplied sailors with 
underclothing. Mother and child were cer- 

13 



RECOLLECTIONS 

tainly in a pitiable condition, poor and friend- 
less, in a narrow by-street of what was then 
thought a great city. 

A second infusion of sailor blood now 
entered into our family, through a person 
who came as a suitor for my mother's hand. 
He was about her age — thirty-two — and 
was just off his last voyage; he had followed 
the sea from boyhood in merchantmen and in 
a man-o'-war or two about the Mediterranean 
coast. Black-haired, bright-eyed, and light- 
hearted as a boy, he could sing, and dance, 
and unwind his yarns — spun in the fore- 
castle — of witches, mermaids, and other 
impossible folk. He was a good husband to 
my mother, and so kind a father to me that 
he would never let her lay the weight of her 
hand on me. " Boys will be boys," he said ; 
and he always remained one. 

We flitted a square or two farther up 
Hanover Street into a more commodious 
dwelling, my luggage consisting of a book of 
my own, the gift, or rather the ante-mortem 
inheritance, from my uncle Martin, whose 
dull, sluggish good-nature would not over- 
come his boyish aversion to the alphabet. It 

14 



A NEW ENGLAND CHILDHOOD 

was " The American First Class Book/' 
edited by John Pierpont, a popular preacher 
and poet of the day. 

How well I remember that old leather- 
covered school-book and its contents, which 
were admirably selected from English and 
from American writers. It introduced its 
readers to several foreign poets, among 
others one or two serious-minded Russians, 
one of whom lingers in my memory in this 
serious line : 

" It thunders ! Sons of Dust, in reverence bow." 

This renderino: from the Russian could 
have come from no other pen than that of 
Bowring, who was considered a great lin- 
guist from his extensive but shallow book- 
ish knowledge of European and Asiatic 
languages and patois, his perversion from 
which would fill a small library. Contempo- 
rary prose was suitably represented in selec- 
tions from Blackwood's Magazine, the new 
monthly, and from Irving's " Sketch Book," a 
pathetic story which drew fewer tears from 
mc then than it would have done six months 
before. 

15 



RECOLLECTIONS 

"The Widow and Her Son," the first- 
poem that I ever saw, was in Pierpont's com- 
pilation. It was of American origin, the 
effusion of a better poet than Pierpont, of 
one who may safely be said to have been in 
the thirties our most widely known man of 
letters, — Nathaniel Parker Willis. There 
was also a copy of verses by Willis, probably 
contributed to one of Goodrich's Annuals, 
and entitled "Saturday Afternoon," which 
opened a new world to me, — but more of 
this later. 

My step-father, though a kind-hearted, 
well-meaning man, was without the art of 
getting on in the world, and such he con- 
tinued to the day of his death some thirty- 
five years later. He worked a while in 
Boston as a stevedore, and then migrated 
to Providence, where he obtained work on a 
railroad, which was being built there. This 
was in the early days of railroads. 



i6 



II 

NEW YORK IN 1835 

SOON after I was ten years old, a jour- 
ney to New York was projected by 
my mother, or possibly by my step- 
father, who, having relatives there, was no 
doubt anxious to meet them once more. He 
was not opposed by this uneasy woman, who, 
collecting her two boys and what baggage 
pertained to them and to herself, shipped 
them and it on a little packet that sailed 
from Providence, Rhode Island, for New 
York, as often as the number of its pas- 
sengers and the bulk of its freight seemed 
to justify that proceeding. 

After a stormy passage of two days, we 
landed at or near the Battery one bright 
Sunday morning late in the autumn of 1835, 
and wandered up Broadway, which was 
swarming with hogs. I remember how 
quiet the town was, as we walked to Canal 
Street, and then west to Greenwich Street, 
where my step-father's brother-in-law kept 
2 17 



RECOLLECTIONS 

a restaurant. I was tried as an assistant 
at the oyster bar, but without much success. 
There was little to choose between the rela- 
tives of my mother and the relatives of 
my step-father, for they were poor on both 
sides ; so I was not benefited by this change 
of residence. 

My early recollections of New York are 
not over and above pleasant, for they con- 
nect themselves with my step-father's family, 
who were just the people not to know, and 
who were the cause of my being sent into 
the street to sell matches. I have some in- 
teresting memories of this period, however, 
for the great fire of 1835 occurred, and I 
was taken to see the smoking ruins. 

Reticent and moody, busy and business- 
like, my mother seemed to have remembered 
my lack of education, and sought a means 
of satisfying it, and, alternately humble and 
proud, decided that she had found it. 

" My son," she said, " shall never go to a 
public school ; " so she selected instead one 
which was kept by a couple of married ped- 
agogues, a Mr. and Mrs. Steele, in the front 
and back basement of a house near by, — an 

18 



NEW YORK IN 1835 

academy, as it purported to be, for *' Young 
Gentlemen and Ladies." What the mistress 
of this establishment taught the pupils I had 
no means of knowing, from those whom I 
saw. They smiled and simpered and looked 
charming and smart in their pretty lace col- 
lars and gay ribbons. 

What its master did not teach his pupils 
I speedily discovered. A tallish, showy per- 
son, good looking in a way ; he was a lazy, 
worthless fellow, who knew nothing, his sole 
qualifications for the position he occupied 
consisting of his boundless ignorance and 
impudence. He knew absolutely nothing, 
and could scarcely have pretended to any 
knowledsfe to himself when alone. 

I remember once asking him how to do a 
sum which had perplexed me, — a simple, easy 
one in the " rule of three." He smirked and 
grinned ; but instead of showing me how 
to do it, he unlocked the drawer of his desk, 
handed me a Key to Daboll's Arithmetic, 
told me to copy on my slate the answer, 
without a word of explanation, and then re- 
turned his precious book once more to its 
guarded safety of lock and key. 

19 



RECOLLECTIONS 

The only book there — the only school- 
book in use, I mean — was written by Par- 
son Weems, an eccentric bookmaker, who, 
by virtue of having been the rector of an 
Episcopal Church at Mount Vernon, which 
Washington attended, elected himself as the 
historiographer of the Father of his Coun- 
try, and our earliest American novelist, in- 
venting for the delectation of his credulous 
readers the famous filial and paternal anec- 
dote of the cherry-tree and the little hatchet. 
Later he was the biographer of Sergeant 
Jasper and General Marion, describing in 
his double memoir the courage of the former 
in his perilous leap from the ramparts of 
Fort Moultrie into the dark waters below 
for the preservation of the colonial flag of 
South Carolina, which had been shot from 
its staff by a belligerent British man-o'-war 
in the offing, and the calculated courtesy 
of Marion in his invitation to the British 
officer who was on a visit to him, probably 
with a flag of truce, to dine with him in the 
forest which surrounded his encampment 
and to partake of his banquet of roasted 
sweet potatoes, — a politic proceeding that 

20 



NEW YORK IN 1835 

captured his gallant adversary and con- 
vinced him that no force in the world 
could conquer a people who could subsist 
on sweet potatoes. 

Disappointed with the manifest scarcity of 
education acquired in the pay school that 
had been chosen for me, and determined 
that I should leave it, my mother sent me 
to the public school. The only examina- 
tion for admission to which I was subjected 
was in my handwriting, which was suffi- 
ciently legible, it seemed, to place me in 
the highest class there, — the ninth class, I 
am proud to remember. 

I was a fluent reader, but the only study 
in which I distinguished myself was geog- 
raphy, in which I became so proficient that 
I could repeat the names of some of our 
mountain ranges, the situation of our prin- 
cipal lakes, the direction of our longest 
rivers, and the boundaries of our oldest 
states and newest territories. My foreign 
geographical knowledge was of Italy and its 
most important products, which I remember 
were corn, wine, silk, and oil. 

Disgusted and angered at my evident in- 
21 



RECOLLECTIONS 

capacity, my mother lost her patience with 
me and all her interest in my education. I 
was old enough, she observed, to earn my 
living, or something toward our common 
living, and I was compelled, when about 
fifteen, to contribute my mite. I became 
an errand boy, a shop boy, and occasionally 
an idle boy on the shady side of sequestered 
streets, where I sometimes loitered to shoot 
marbles with lads of my own age ; I may 
have been reprehensible, and vicious, if you 
insist upon it, but never enough so to figure 
as a " Park Shooter." 

Shifting fi-om one employment to another, 
I obtained a situation in one of a series of 
law ofifices in a little Inn of Court in Beek- 
man Street. My handwriting served me 
here, and I was engaged as a legal copyist, 
my duties as such resolving themselves into 
a second or third transcription of affidavits 
wherein Simple Simon, being duly sworn, 
did depose and say whatever he had per- 
suaded himself was the grievance from which 
he was suffering at the time. 

My salary was small, — less than a dollar 
a week, — but small as it was my mother 

22 



NEW YORK IN 1835 

allowed me fifty cents a month out of it, 
which large sum was thoughtfully invested 
in books. I haunted old book-stalls after 
of^ce hours, and picked up bargains in the 
shape of odd volumes, mostly of the English 
poets. Among other poets whose acquaint- 
ance I made at this time were Beattie and 
Falconer. I read the story of Edwin, who 
was no vulgar minstrel boy ; but I could 
not read the story of Palaemon. I could see 
that Beattie had some claim to be considered 
a poet, but I could not see, nor have I ever 
been able to see, what shadow of a claim 
Falconer had. 

Business was dull and clients scarce dur- 
ing my residence in these inns of court. I 
remember, however, one client who visited 
our little ofBce, on a summary request from 
its principal to do so. I was sitting idly at 
my desk one day, when the door opened and 
an unknown figure crossed the threshold ; 
he was a gentleman of twenty-six or twenty- 
eight, bright-eyed, good-looking, and more 
than well dressed — dandyfied. There was 
between him and his tailor an outstanding 
bill for the non-payment of clothes, prob- 

23 



RECOLLECTIONS 

ably those he then had on. It was Mr. J. 
H. Ingraham, who was the first novehst I 
ever met face to face and hand to hand, the 
author of several fictions of an aquatic 
nature, such as " Lafitte ; or, the Pirate of 
the Gulf," " Captain Kidd," and " The Danc- 
ing Feather," — the forerunner, in the last 
mentioned work, of such masters of the craft 
as Lieutenant Judson — "Ned Buntline " 
— and Mr. Sylvanus Cobb. 

I once had the honour of meeting " Ned 
Buntline " on Blackwell's Island, whither he 
had been sent for stimulating into a riot the 
dramatic difference of opinion which then 
existed between the admirers of Mr. Edwin 
Forrest, on the one hand, and Mr. William 
Charles Macready on the other. I never had 
the honour of meeting Mr. Cobb anywhere. 

To return to Mr. Ingraham, however, who 
at a later period and in a more pacific turn 
of mind concluded to diversify his experience 
and widen his career by becoming the in- 
cumbent of an Episcopal Church in Mis- 
sissippi, and continuing his former vocation 
therein, but in a higher, holier, more Biblical 
direction, in three gorgeous romances of 

24 



NEW YORK IN 1835 

early Hebrew royal personages and mirac- 
ulous events, proving himself in these the 
forerunner of General Lew Wallace, who 
surpassed him in his imaginative simplicity 
with the heroic mythologies of the Orient 
and Mexico. 

My intellectual life was broadened at this 
time, and brightened by the substitution of 
literature for law. This felicity was accom- 
plished by a weekly paper, of which Mr. Park 
Benjamin and Mr. Epes Sargent were the 
editors, and which was called the New World. 
It was, I think, the first paper of the kind 
ever published in New York, and was admi- 
rable for what it was and was intended to be ; 
namely, the speediest and cheapest reprint 
of the most popular British authors. I seem 
to remember reading in its spacious columns 
the novels of Lever, Cockton, G. P. R. James, 
and certainly one by Dickens, for it was in 
the New World, in its weekly winding up of 
" Master Humphrey's Clock," that I wondered 
at and sobbed over the pitiable wanderings 
of Little Nell and her grandfather. 

Another journal which was a liberal educa- 
tion to me was the Mirror, edited by Mr. N. 

25 



RECOLLECTIONS 

P. Willis and Mr. George P. Morris, who 
issued, at intervals, a Mirror Library, — if 
that is what it was called, — the specialty of 
which was its reprints of favourite writers. 
One number was devoted to the " English 
Songs " of Barry Cornwall, and another to 
" The Eve of St. Agnes " of Keats. I en- 
joyed my reading, without regard to my like 
or dislike of the poet upon whom it was 
bestowed; but it taught me nothing, for I 
was not clever enough to imitate, nor intel- 
ligent enough to originate : all the same, I 
continued to write. 

About this time I became a sort of facto- 
tum in the ofHce of a new and short-lived 
journal which reported the sayings and do- 
ings of Dickens, who was then travelling in 
this country. This distant connection with 
authorship brought me in contact with an- 
other author, in the person of Mr. Lewis 
Gaylord Clark, the editor of The Knicker- 
bocker Magazine, who was a contributor to 
the journal in question. It was soon mori- 
bund, and another situation had to be ob- 
tained. One was found, — or made. It was 
in a tailors shop, where the aspiring rhym- 

26 



NEW YORK IN 1835 

ster cooled his natural ardour by spong- 
ing cloth, and encouraged his propensity for 
commerce by selling slop-clothes to sailors. 

I was next installed as book-keeper in a 
bankrupt brush and bellows factory. From 
this I was transplanted to an occupation for 
which I was most unfit in that it demanded 
what I never possessed — physical strength 
and endurance. What my mother was think- 
ing of when she sent me to learn the trade 
of a blacksmith, I never knew ; but send me 
she did, and I tried to learn the trade, though 
unsuccessfully. I was put at once at the 
anvil, and before the day was over my right 
hand was so blistered that I had to open its 
fingers with my left hand, and detach them 
from the handle of the sledge-hammier that I 
wielded. Clearly I was not intended for a 
blacksmith. Even my mother saw this at 
the end of three or four days, and permitted 
me to find lighter employment. 

It came to me, I never quite knew how, 
in the shape of iron moulding. When 
about eighteen years old, I went into an 
iron foundry to learn the trade. My wages 
were ^2.25 a week for the first year, ^^3.00 

27 



RECOLLECTIONS 

for the second year, and $3.75 for the third 
year. I was in the foundry for some three 
years, and it was hard work. I was a slender 
boy, and my task was to carry in each hand 
a ladle containing forty pounds of molten 
iron, and to keep up with the other men 
in filling the moulds in which we were 
casting fenders and frames for fireplaces. 
When the casting was made, we had to 
break the mould and take it out, and throw 
water on the sand, and then we would try 
to find a cool place in which to recover. 
There would be four or five men at a 
time pouring the molten metal into the 
moulds. This firm of iron founders is still 
in existence. 

I was then living with my mother in De- 
lancey Street. There was comparatively little 
of the city above Canal Street. Though the 
work was hard for a delicate boy, it had to 
be done. I had one consolation, however, 
which could not be taken from me ; the day 
would end, night would come, and then I 
could write poetry. It was sorry stuff, and 
no one knew it better than I; but it gave 
me pleasure, and offended no one. I never 

28 



NEW YORK IN 1835 

offered it for publication, I was not vain 
enough for that ; but when it had served its 
turn, and I was beyond it, I wisely com- 
mitted it to the flames. Such was my early 
life. 

Later I met an acquaintance who was 
working for Marsh, a carriage painter, who, 
I remember, had a boy who attained a great 
celebrity as a drummer. I worked for Marsh 
for some months. My chief occupation was 
to rub down old carriages from the Astor 
House with pumice stone, so that the old 
cracked paint was removed, and the ground 
prepared for fresh varnish. Years after, 
when Artemus Ward came to New York, 
he boarded with Marsh, who told him 
several queer tales about me. 



29 



Ill 

MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

TO retrace my steps a little, let me 
say, though a reader from boyhood, 
it was years before it occurred to me 
that a book was other than a book. Not 
that all books were alike, — far from it ; but 
that a book was a book, whatever was its 
subject, and whoever was its author. That 
there are books which are not books, except 
in their outward form, and that there are 
" books which are books," as Lamb puts it, 
was a late discovery of mine, and one which 
I might never have made if I had not tried 
to write books myself. I cannot remember 
the time when I did not read, nor (hardly) 
when I did not write. If I had been asked 
why I wrote, I could only have said it was 
because I wanted to. 

As I have explained, I had no education, 
or only such rudiments of education as were 
taught in the common schools of the thirties, 

30 



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^B^ 



t<\,nt^i \,xj^ 






.cy 



{Aii 









if'^ 



'iWf/ ^1^ A>A4/^Ady n^(K.K. fnim(^cAQ<Ky^ z^^^^ 



1, 



^■'Ji 






Manuscript of a Poem by Burns 



MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

and the material conditions which surrounded 
me were not of a kind that was stimulating, 
they were so barren and so depressing. I 
was not emulous of my school-fellows, who 
were more clever than I, and I was not con- 
fident of myself, for I concealed my scrib- 
blings. I read everything that came in my 
way, and, strange to say, nothing seemed to 
come in my way but verse. The first poet 
whom I read was Burns, and, despite my 
ignorance of his dialect, he exercised a 
singular fascination over me, a fascination 
that made me try my hand at a Scotch song. 
How did it run ? — 

Oh, say, hae ye seen my Mary? 
She 's a bonnie lass, wi' a saft blue ee. 
And she trips as lichtlie owre the lea 
As ony, ony fairy. 

From Burns I passed to Thomson, to 
Cowper, to Beattie, to Falconer, and, last of 
all, to Shakespeare, or so much of Shake- 
speare as was included in an odd volume 
which contained two of his Roman plays 
and " Troilus and Cressida," and which I 
found hard reading. By-and-by I escaped 
from the eighteenth-century poets, and made 

31 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the acquaintance of Mrs. Hemans, Miss Lan- 
don, and Miss Eliza Cook. At a later period 
I was in touch with contemporary verse, 
and, indeed, with contemporary literature 
generally, and this was through the New 
World, — which I have already mentioned. 

I have forgotten what I tried to write 
about, nor does it matter, for, whatever it 
was, it was nothing of which I possessed 
any knowledge. I had no experience upon 
which I could draw, and if I had aspirations 
I was not aware of them. When I was sev- 
enteen or thereabouts, I heard of a drug- 
clerk in the neighbourhood whom I was told 
I ought to know. He was of my own age, 
or nearly so, and was troubled with the same 
complaint of scribbling verse. He flew at 
higher game than I did, however, and with 
a bolder wing. For, while I fluttered about 
my poor mundane trifles, he soared aloft 
in the heaven of solemn song. One of his 
themes, I remember, was " A Dialogue be- 
tween Christian and Experience," and an- 
other was "A Soliloquy on Golgotha." 

He read these pieces to me as he wrote 
them, and if I did not greatly admire them, 

32 



MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

as I fear I did not, for I could never endure 
religious verse, he certainly did, for he read 
them over and over again. He believed in 
himself more than in me, for I soon noticed 
that he .never asked me to read my pieces ; 
and I was glad he did not, since they were 
not of a kind that he could care for. His 
mind was more active than mine, and in 
more directions, for, while he was never 
weary of wooing the Muse of Zion, he al- 
ways found time 

" To sport with Amaryllis in the shade, 
Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair." 

He was more voluminous than I could be, 
and more ambitious than I dared be, for the 
moment he scrawled through his effusions 
he copied them and sent them to the Sun- 
day papers. 

It delighted him to see his name in print 
there — I could not understand why, since 
he professed the greatest contempt for edit- 
ors, who never knew good verse from bad ; 
but so it was, and I wondered at him. If I 
had known that he was dying of consump- 
tion, I might have understood his incessant 
3 33 



RECOLLECTIONS 

restlessness of mind and his diseased desire 
for distinction ; but I did not until it was 
too late. He died, and made no sign. I 
felt his loss for a time, not so much on his 
account, I fear, as on my own, for in losing 
him I lost my only friend. I had no one to 
visit then, no one to talk with ; I had noth- 
ing but my books, which I knew by heart, 
and pens, ink, and paper, which I abused. 
Why I wrote, night after night, in my lone- 
some bedroom, by the light of an oil lamp, 
I never knew. I copied my verses in little 
books, and though the verses increased in 
number the books did not, for before I filled 
the second I destroyed the first, and before 
I filled the third I destroyed the second. 
I might, perhaps, have stopped produc- 
tion, but I could not possibly have stopped 
destruction. 

After many holocausts, I wrote a small 
piece, which, on reading it over carefully, I 
concluded to spare, since it seemed to me 
better than anything I had yet written. It 
might not be good, — though I hoped it was, 
— but, as I saw worse things in print every 
day, I resolved to have it printed — if I could. 

34 



MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

It was an apostrophe to several ideal qualities, 
— Wealth, Power, Ambition, Truth, ^ — which, 
for their shortcomings, I sentenced to extinc- 
tion, excepting the last, which I reprieved 
in the last stanza, telling Death that Truth 
would be the death of him. I finished this 
clumsy fantasy as well as I could, gave it a 
Latin title, " Non Omnis Moriar," made a 
clean copy of it, and sent it to a little peri- 
odical, — a weekly, I think, which I had some- 
where stumbled across. It was called The 
Rover, and was edited by Seba Smith, whose 
name I remembered from having seen it in 
one of my school-books attached to a copy 
of verses, " The Mother Perishing in a 
Snow-Storm." 

A week passed, two weeks passed, and, as 
the poem did not appear, I lost a half-day in 
order to learn its fate. I found the office of 
The Rover, which was in, or near, what is 
now called " Newspaper Row," in Nassau 
Street, or Fulton Street, and I found Mr. 
Smith in the editorial room, which was on 
the second floor, and was a part of the com- 
posing-room, as was the custom then. He 
was what I considered an elderly man, — 

35 



RECOLLECTIONS 

somewhat over fifty, I imagine, — was tall, 
or seemed so as he sat at his desk writing, 
had a pleasant face, a kind, bright eye, and 
a sweet, gentle voice. 

I mentioned my namx, and said I had sent 
a poem to him to see if he would print it. 
I had made a bet that he would n't, and if I 
had won the bet, as I expected, I was going 
to claim it. 

He smiled, rather incredulously, I thought, 
as if he doubted the bet (which was a gen- 
uine one), and said that if I had wanted to 
win I should have wagered the other way. 
The poem not only would be printed, but 
was printed ; and, opening his desk, he 
handed me a copy of The Rover. I was 
surprised, and told him so. 

Then I thanked him, and, hurrying from 
the room and down the stairs, stopped when 
I reached the sidewalk to see how I looked 
in print. Many years have passed since that 
day, — more than half a century, I fancy, — 
but I have never forgotten it, nor Mr. Seba 
Smith, who was the first editor, the first poet, 
the first man of letters, whom I was fortunate 
enough to meet. 

36 



MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

The kindness with which Mr. Smith re- 
ceived me removed any apprehensions that 
I might have had respecting the treatment 
I was Hkely to receive from men of estab- 
lished reputation, and served to strengthen 
my confidence in my own talents. I still 
shrank from my elders, but I no longer 
dreaded them ; and to convince myself that 
I did not, I sought acquaintance with an- 
other writer who was well spoken of in two 
or three critical journals. His name was 
Ralph Hoyt : he was an Episcopal clergy- 
man, the pastor of the Church of the Good 
Shepherd, and the author of a volume of 
supposititious poetry. 

Why I sought his acquaintance instead of 
continuing and cultivating my acquaintance 
with Mr. Smith I know not, but probably 
because I felt the need of something which 
I did not obtain from books, and which I 
fancied could be obtained only from contact 
with more mature minds. My remembrance 
of my first visit to Mr. Hoyt is vague. He 
received me in what I took to be his lodg- 
ings, on the second floor of an old house on 
the east side of the town, listened with a 

37 



RECOLLECTIONS 

meditative air to what I had to say, and re- 
plied in a measured, precise way, weighing 
his words as if he were in the pulpit. When 
the interview — which was not a long one — 
was over, he invited me to visit him when- 
ever I had time, and to bring what I wrote 
with me. 

If I had been asked how I felt when I 
parted from him, I could not have told. 
That he had been very courteous to me 
was certain. But mingled with this cour- 
tesy was, or I fancied there was, a kind of 
condescension, which puzzled me. I tried 
to analyse his manner on my way home, 
but, as analysis was not habitual with me, 
I soon abandoned it. 

" He is a minister," I thought, " and all 
ministers talk as he did. It is the badge of 
his profession, the nap of his cloth, and I 
may have rubbed it the wrong way." 

At the end of several months I paid a 
second visit to Mr. Hoyt, who had removed 
from lodgings and was living in a smaller 
house, of which he and his family appeared 
to be the only occupants. Like the neigh- 
bourhood in which it stood, it was poor, — a 

38 



MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

shabby little brick dwelling two stories high, 
with a rickety wooden stoop, and an ash- 
barrel on the edge of the curbstone. I lifted 
the rusty iron knocker, which fell with a dull 
thud, and was finally admitted into the dingy 
hall-way by a frouzy Irish girl, who showed 
me into what she called " the dochtor's 
stoody." It was scantily furnished with 
three or four black haircloth chairs, a faded 
and worn ingrain carpet, and a large ma- 
hogany table between the two front win- 
dows. At the table sat the poet, clothed 
in his clerical suit (he had been ofiRciating 
at a funeral, he informed me), but looking 
somewhat less grave than on my first visit. 
He asked me what I had been doing since 
he saw me last, and I told him that I had 
been working at my trade. The literalness 
of my answer seemed to surprise him. 

" I did not mean that," he replied ; " I 
meant, what have you been reading and 
writing?" I told him that I had lately read 
Leigh Hunt and John Keats, and liked 
them very much. 

He stared at me blankly, as if he had 
never heard their names before, whereat I 

39 



RECOLLECTIONS 

wondered; though I should not have done 
so, for I soon discovered that his reading 
was less than mine. He was not a reader, 
and when I showed him my latest piece I 
discovered that he was not a critic. He 
perused it slowly, pausing at every second or 
third line in a search for flaws, after which, 
with knitted brows, he resumed his snail-like 
perusal. When he finished the manuscript 
he handed it back to me with a judicial air 
and a few perfunctory words that meant 
nothing. 

If I had been a little older and a little 
bolder I would probably have questioned the 
justice of his judgment; but what would have 
been the use ? He did not like my verse, — 
that was evident ; and I misfht have known 
he would not like it, for if his verse was good 
mine was bad, and if mine was good his was 
bad indeed. He hurt me, and he humiliated 
me. That he hurt me was, no doubt, my 
fault, for I had no right to be sensitive ; but 
that he humiliated me was certainly his 
fault, for he had no right to be patronising. 
But perhaps I expected too much from him, 
— expected praise, which I did not deserve, 

40 



MY FIRST LITERARY ACQUAINTANCES 

and sympathy, which he could not bestow. 
He was a poor clergyman, with a parish to 
look after, and a family to provide for. 

I can put myself in his place now as I 
could not then, and divining what his life 
was, how busy, how devoted, how anxious, 
and how narrow, I can see that I was not, 
and could not be, much to him. That he 
was friendly I knew ; that he liked me I 
believed ; and that he saw promise in my 
verse I was told by others, to whom he 
spoke well of it. 



41 



IV 



THE NEW WORLD AND THE KNICKER- 
BOCKER MAGAZINE 

IT was through Mr. Hoyt that I became 
acquainted with my third literary friend, 
who expressed to him a wish to meet 
me. This was Mr. Park Benjamin. 

Mr. Benjamin was a very different man 
from Mr. Hoyt, — certain where he was hesi- 
tant, outspoken where he was reticent, 
good-natured but quick-tempered, hasty but 
generous, dogmatic, impulsive, aggressive, 
resolute. The son of an American mer- 
chant in Demerara, where he was born in 
the first decade of the century, his nature 
was tropical, his nurture tender and solici- 
tous. Lame from infancy, he was brought 
to this country when he was three years old, 
and was educated at first in a little town in 
Connecticut, and afterward at New Haven, 
where the family of his father resided. At 
the age of sixteen he was sent to Harvard 
College, which he quitted before the close of 

42 



THE WORLD AND KNICKERBOCKER 

his second year, in consequence of a severe 
illness, and entered Washington College, 
whence he was graduated with the highest 
honours. 

He studied law for a while at Cambridge 
and New Haven, and was admitted to the 
bar in Connecticut and Massachusetts ; but 
if he had any practice he soon abandoned it 
for literature. He reaped no glory from two 
periodicals with which he was associated, — 
the New England Magazine and the Ameri- 
can Monthly Magazine ; but, what with his 
expenditures thereon, and unfortunate in- 
vestments in other directions, he managed 
to lose most of his patrimonial property. 
His next literary venture was in the New 
Yorker with Mr. Horace Greeley, and the 
New World with Mr. Epes Sargent. 

When I met him he was editing a weekly 
paper, the name of which I have forgotten. 
There was that in Mr. Benjamin which 
placed him in the front rank of the editors 
of his time. He was as well and widely 
known as Mr. Webb or Mr. Bryant, Mr. 
Willis or Mr. Poe. He was a power in 
journalism, and, so far as he mingled in it, 

43 



RECOLLECTIONS 

a power in society, for he had a ready wit 
and a sarcastic tongue. But he was more 
than this : he was a favourite poet, not so 
popular as Mr. Longfellow, — no American 
versifier was that, — but fully as popular as 
Mr. Willis, or Mr. Morris, or Mr. Hoffman. 
He had a knack of hitting the taste of 
average readers of poetry in his selection of 
subjects, and feeling enough to satisfy the 
taste of readers of a higher order. 

Mr. Hoyt must have furnished me with 
the personal address of Mr. Benjamin, for 
instead of seeking him at the ofifice of his 
paper I proceeded to his lodgings, which 
consisted of two or more large rooms in a 
large old house in Beekman Street. Once 
a fashionable dwelling in a wealthy neigh- 
bourhood, it had fallen from its high estate, 
and was occupied by decadent and incipient 
counsellors-at-law, among whose gilded tin 
signs in the hall I saw the name of Mr. 
Benjamin and the number of his room. I 
knocked at his door, and was commanded to 
enter. I entered, and saw, seated at a table, 
a thick-set, broad-shouldered man, with a 
powerful frame, who wrote rapidly. 

44 



' THE WORLD AND KNICKERBOCKER 

'' Well ? " he said, without looking up. 
His voice was quick, loud, a little impatient, 
perhaps, but so musical and cheery that I 
was not disconcerted by it nor daunted by 
its owner. 

When I mentioned my name he helped 
himself up on his feet by the crutches that 
stood beside his chair, gave me his hand, 
and said : 

" I am glad to see you, Stoddard. Take 
a seat and make yourself at home." The 
frankness and heartiness of his greeting put 
me at once at ease. " You had no trouble in 
finding me ? " 

" None : I know this neighbourhood well. 
I ought to, for I was in an office just below 
when I was a boy, — a lawyer's office. You 
were editing the A/'ew World then, right back 
of here, in Ann Street : I used to run around 
there early every Saturday forenoon to get 
my paper." 

" So you read the New World, did you } " 
I convinced him that I did by referring to 
certain poems of his that had appeared in it, 
particularly one called " Gold," suggested by 
a saying of Joseph Bonaparte's, that gold in 

45 



RECOLLECTIONS 

its last analysis was the sweat of the poor 
and the blood of the brave. 

When I parted from Mr. Benjamin, whose 
time I did not occupy long, for I saw he was 
busy, though he protested not, I felt as if I 
had known him all my life. 

The day that I made the acquaintance of 
Mr. Benjamin was a red-letter day in my 
life, in that it cleared my mental atmosphere 
and sharpened my worldly vision. I ceased 
to distrust myself as I had done, and if not 
yet confident that I possessed talents, was 
prepared to be when the time should come. 
His cordiality lessened my timidity and his 
heartiness increased my courage, for since 
he forgot it I did not remember the dif- 
ference between us, and when it was 
"Stoddard" with him it was "Benjamin" 
with me. He thought well enough of my 
taste to read his poems to me when they 
were "hot from the anvil," as he put it, and 
to ask my opinion of them ; and I gave it, 
crude as it must have been. 

One day he wrote a poem while I sat 
talking with him, a didactic piece, which he 
called " Press On," and in which he enforced 

46 



THE WORLD AND KNICKERBOCKER 

that persistent lesson in a series of spirited 
images, in one of which he, or his poetic 
hero, was triumphant, — 

" And through the ebon walls of night 
'Hewed down a passage into day." 

He was a clear-sighted, hard-headed man, 
full of worldly knowledge, blunt and rough 
of speech, reminding me, when I came to 
know him well, of what we read of Ben Jon- 
son, whom he resembled personally, if old 
Ben's portraits may be trusted. He may 
have had his faults, — I have been told since 
that he had many, — but if so I never saw 
them, for he was always kind, considerate, 
and generous to me. He was my friend 
when I sorely needed a friend, and I shall 
never forget him. 

I never knew much of my next friend, 
with whom my relations were rather of a 
literary than a personal character. This was 
Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clark, to whom I have 
already alluded, the editor of the Knick- 
erbocker Magazine^ to which I sent such 
samples of my verse as seemed to me 
not unworthy of print. 

47 



RECOLLECTIONS 

From continuous and patient practice I 
had now acquired considerable skill in the 
construction of melodious lines and the use 
of unforced rhymes, and if I had not attained 
excellence of execution, I had attained defin- 
iteness of conception. I knew what I wanted 
to write, and, within my limitations, how to 
write it. It was something outside of myself, 
something healthier and larger, something 
that concerned the emotions of mankind, and 
not my own petty feelings. If it was a river, 
and I wrote about a river, I described the 
stretch of country through which it flowed, 
and its human environments ; if it was a wood, 
and I wrote about a wood, I described its 
shadowy leafage, the notes of its birds, and 
recalled the phantoms of its aboriginal in- 
habitants; if it was a cathedral, and I wrote 
about a cathedral, I described its massive 
architecture and its historic associations, 
peopling the long-drawn aisles with mediae- 
val worshippers, the festivity of their wed- 
dings, the solemnity of their funerals, and 
whatever else imagination suggested as 
proper to the place and time. 

It was obvious verse, but it suited Mr. 
48 



THE WORLD AND KNICKERBOCKER 

Clark, who was an obvious man, not remark- 
able, perhaps, for his literary attainments, 
but knowing what he wanted and what his 
readers wanted. For he was always in 
touch with them at his " Editor's Table," 
where he presided like a genial host, whose 
business it was, whatever his fare, to keep 
them in good humour with themselves and 
with him. 

There was no money in the Knickerbocker 
Magazine, — certainly none for its contribu- 
tors, — but its jaunty editor managed to 
live out of it, and live well, his enemies 
said ; for if cash was not abundant with him, 
credit was, — and what could a happy-go- 
lucky fellow want besides an abundance of 
credit.? I liked Mr. Clark, what little I saw 
of him, and naturally, since he liked my 
verses and printed them speedily. It was a 
friendly action on his part, for it relieved me 
from what the first Lord Lytton calls the 
" dungeon of my low estate," and, if it did 
not give me a recognised place among 
authors, it enabled me to mingle among 
the literati. 



49 



V 

MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

I MET Bayard Taylor first In 1848. We 
were both young men, for we were born 
in the same year, — 1825, — he in January 
and I in July, and we both had one thing in 
common, — a love of poetry and a belief that 
we were poets. We may have doubted some 
things, but that supreme thing we did not 
and would not doubt. It was a consolation 
to me, and a glory to him. I was familiar 
with his writings before he could have been 
with mine, and, knowing something of his 
history from the newspapers, I was prepared 
to like him, if we should ever meet. He had 
been to Europe, and had published his " Views 
Afoot," which had made his name widely 
known, while I had merely printed a few 
verses in the magazines. 

The Umo7z Magazine, which had been 
started in New York a year before, was the 
immediate cause of our acquaintance. It 
was edited by Mrs. Caroline M. Kirkland, an 

50 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

estimable woman and a charming writer, 
who had read a little manuscript volume of 
verse which I had inflicted upon her good 
nature, who had kindly loaned me books 
from hex library, and who had accepted some 
of my verses for her periodical. 

She was the most judicious friend whom I 
had yet made, and she was also a friend of 
Bayard Taylor, who was one of her most 
valued contributors. She talked with me 
about him, and just before she went to 
Europe, leaving him to fill her editorial 
chair, she said : " Call upon him after I am 
gone, and introduce yourself to him. You 
will like him." 

I have tasked my memory to recover the 
reason of my first calling upon Bayard Taylor, 
and, I believe, I may say that it was to learn 
the fate of a manuscript which he had re- 
ceived either from Mrs. Kirkland or from 
myself. I found him in the editorial room 
of the New York Tribu7te, of which he was 
one of the three or four minor editors. This 
room was in striking contrast to the editorial 
rooms of the great metropolitan journals of 
to-day. One was not carried up to it by an 

51 



RECOLLECTIONS 

elevator, nor on reaching its entrance de- 
barred until he should write his name and 
state his business on the slip of paper which 
is now insolently furnished him for that 
purpose. On the contrary, he groped his 
way as well as he could up several flights of 
dirty, rickety stairs until he reached the 
composing-room, where the editors of this 
powerful sheet were penned together like 
cattle. I found Taylor in one of these little 
pens. 

Compositors were at work close by the 
desk at which he was seated, which was 
lumbered with books and newspapers, not 
forgetting the necessary editorial shears. It 
was one of two desks which were placed 
back to back, for the accommodation of him- 
self and a fellow-editor, who was charged 
with the shipping news of the paper. 

" Is Mr. Bayard Taylor here ? " I asked, in 
a general way, of the two persons who were 
occupying these desks. 

The one who was nearest me looked up 
from his work, and replied, " I am he." 

" My name is Stoddard," I said, " and I 
have come to see whether you can use — " 

52 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

Here I named an early production of 
mine, which, I believe, was addressed to 
Oblivion (if so, it has reached its destination), 
and he assured me that he not only could 
use it, but that it would appear in a certain 
number of the Union Magazine, which he 
specified, and which I was glad to learn was 
not a remote one. 

He must have risen during his conversa- 
tion, for I saw that he was taller than myself. 
I have before me now a vision of him in his 
young manhood, — tall, erect, active-looking, 
and manly, with an aquiline nose, bright, 
loving eyes, and the dark, ringleted hair with 
which we endow, in ideal, the heads of poets. 
There was a kindness and a courtesy in his 
greeting which went straight to my heart, and 
assured me that I had found a friend. 

What conversation other than that I have 
indicated passed between us I have forgotten, 
though I know that he must have asked 
me to come to see him, both in the editorial 
room and at his own room, for I visited 
him at both places soon afterward. 

Bayard Taylor and I met at night generally, 
for neither could call the day his own ; he 

53 



RECOLLECTIONS 

had his work to do on the Tribune, and I had 
mine to do in the foundry. Apart from pol- 
itics, his was the cleaner of the two, but not 
the least laborious, I am sure. He wrote 
fifteen hours a day, he told me, scribbling 
book notices, leaders, foreign news, reports, — 
turning his hand and pen to everything that 
went to the making of a newspaper in 1849. 
There was but one night in the week 
when he could do what he pleased, and 
that was Saturday night, which we always 
spent together when he was in town. I 
looked forward to it as a school-boy looks 
forward to a holiday, and was happy when it 
came. I have forgotten where his rooms 
were, but as nearly as I can recollect they 
were in a boarding-house on Murray Street, 
not far from Broadway. They were sky 
parlours, as the saying is, for he liked a 
good outlook; and besides, they suited his 
purse, which was not plethoric with shekels. 
In the first of these rooms, which was set 
apart for his books, there was a little table 
at which he wrote late into the night, rest- 
ing his soul with poetry after the prosaic 
labours of the day. 

54 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

It was poetry which had made us friends, 
and we never spent a night together without 
talking about it, and without reading the 
poems we had written since our last meet- 
ing. If the Muses had favoured me, I brought 
their favours with me, and mouthed them out 
in innocent audacity. I thought well of my 
attempts, no doubt, but never in my wildest 
moments did I dream of comparing myself 
with him. He had an imagination which 
surpassed mine, a command of the fervours 
and splendours of language, and an intuitive 
knowledge of rhetoric and of sonorous har- 
monies of rhythm. 

I have been looking over his poetical 
works, and I find that there are but few 
of his early poems which I did not read, 
or which he did not read to me, in manu- 
script. His mind was so fertile and his 
execution so rapid that he generally had 
one or more new poems to show me when 
we met. I sit with him now in thought, 
and hear him read the " Metempsychosis of 
the Pine," " Hylas," " Kubleh," and " Ariel in 
the Cloven Pine." The last impressed me 
so deeply that I wrote a companion piece, in 

55 



RECOLLECTIONS 

which I tried to embody the personality of 
Caliban. 

The conversation and the poetic practice 
of Bayard Taylor were the only intellectual 
stimulant I had, and if I wrote better than 
I had done previous to making his acquaint- 
ance, I felt that it was largely due to him. 
There was an enthusiasm about him which 
was contagious. We were a help to each 
other, and we were a hindrance also, I can 
see now, for we admired too indiscrimi- 
nately, and criticised too tenderly. 

My favourite poet was Keats, and his was 
Shelley, and we pretended to believe that the 
souls of these poets had returned to earth in 
our bodies. My worship of my master was 
restricted to a silent imitation of his diction ; 
my comrade's worship of his master took the 
form of an "Ode to Shelley," which I thought, 
and still think, the noblest poem that his 
immortal genius has inspired. It is followed 
in the volume before me (" Poems of Home 
and Travel," 1855) by an airy lyric on Sicil- 
ian Wine, which was written out of his head, 
as the children say, for he had no Sicilian 
wine, nor, indeed, wine of any other vintage. 

56 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

He had cigars, however, and he tempted 
me into the use of the Indian weed. He 
tempted me, also, into the eating of oysters 
before we parted for the night, and it was 
our custom to repair to a restaurant near by, 
and to supply ourselves with that succulent 
brain food. 

These Saturday nights of ours were more 
to me, I think, than they could possibly have 
been to Bayard Taylor ; for if his days were 
passed in mental drudgery, they were passed 
in the society of gentlemen, while mine were 
passed in hard, physical labour amongst com- 
mon workmen and apprentices. I had no 
friend except himself, and no companionship 
but that of books and my own thoughts. If 
I had not enjoyed myself at those seasons, I 
must have been more or less than human. 
As Cowley said of Hervey, — 

" To him my Muse made haste with ev'ry Strain, 
Whilst it was New, and Warm yet from the Brain. 
He loved my worthless Rhymes, and like a Friend 

Would find out something to Commend. 
Hence now, my Miise, thou canst not me delight ; 

Be this my latest Verse 

With which I now Adorn his Herse, 
And this my 6^r/^ without thy Help shall write." 

57 



RECOLLECTIONS 

My intimacy with Taylor brought me in 
contact with other authors, poets, dramatists, 
and novelists, and was a passport into liter- 
ary households. It was in his rooms that 
I first met Buchanan Read, George Boker, 
Richard Kimball, and Dr. Griswold, who 
enjoyed a doubtful distinction as the chief 
herdsman of our Parnassian fold. 

It was the fashion to abuse Griswold 
while he was living, — a fashion set by 
would-be poets whom he omitted from his 
anthologies, and still preserved by their de- 
scendants. I knew him as well as a younger 
man could know his elder or a poet his 
critic, and always found him kindly, courte- 
ous, and generous. His critical sins were 
not those of omission, but commission: he 
was too lenient. 

He had chambers somewhere on Broad- 
way, where Taylor and I used to meet him 
on winter evenings, and where we smoked 
while he brewed a punch, one of the ingre- 
dients of which was arrack, of which we par- 
took sparingly. It reminded him, he said, of 
a similar beverage to which the chaplain in 
"Jonathan Wild" was addicted, because it 

58 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

was nowhere forbidden in the Scriptures. 
The good doctor was a rigid Calvinist and 
a great admirer of the writings of Jonathan 
Edwards ; but theology and criticism and 
poetry • were soon banished for travel, for 
about this time the wave of emigration 
swept westward to California, where gold 
had lately been discovered, to the great 
delight of the impecunious. 

If Bayard Taylor had been in easy cir- 
cumstances in 1849, I hardly think he would 
have gone to California as the correspondent 
of the Tribune, But his circumstances were 
not easy, so he went manfully, and wrote a 
capital book about his experiences in the 
new Eldorado, and, better still, a number of 
California ballads, of which any poet might 
have been proud. They were so popular, I 
remember, that one of the best of them, 
" Manuela," provoked an amusing parody 
called " Martha Hopkins " from Phoebe Cary, 
which delighted the parodied poet, who was 
good-natured enough to take as well as to 
give. 

The American Parnassus was a Bedlam 
in the autumn of 1850, and Bayard Taylor 

59 



RECOLLECTIONS 

was the innocent cause of its madness. The 
Prince of Showmen had imported Jenny 
Lind to sing before his admiring country- 
men, and, to flatter their national vanity, he 
offered a prize of two hundred dollars for an 
original song for her. All the versifiers in 
the land set at once to work to immortalise 
themselves and to better their fortunes, and 
as many as six hundred confidently expected 
to do so. 

Among the competitors were Taylor and 
myself, — not that we cared for the doubt- 
ful honour which the production of a suc- 
cessful song for Jenny Lind would confer 
upon us, but that we were willing to add 
to our finances, which were not flourishing. 
Bayard Taylor came one afternoon early 
in September, and confided to me the fact 
that he was to be declared the winner of 
this perilous honour, and that he foresaw 
a row. 

" They will say it was given to me because 
Putnam, who is my publisher, is one of the 
committee, and because Ripley, who is my 
associate on the Tribune, is another." 

" If you think so," I answered, " withdraw 
60 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

your name, and put my name in place of it. 
You shall have the money, and I will bear 
the abuse." 

He laughed, and left me, as I thought, to 
do what I had suggested ; but he concluded 
to acknowledge the authorship himself, and 
stand the consequences. The decision of 
the committee was published next day, and 
the indignation of the disappointed competi- 
tors was unbounded. They rushed to all the 
editors whom they knew, or could reach, and 
these sharp-witted gentlemen, having an eye 
for mischief as well as fun, published their 
prose and their verse, which ranged from an 
epigram up to an epic. 

The choice of the committee had fallen 
upon only two out of the whole number of 
manuscripts which had been sent to them, — 
Taylor s and Epes Sargent's, — and being in 
some doubt as to which of the two was the 
more suitable for the occasion, they showed 
both to Jenny Lind, who chose the shorter 
one, as containing the feeling she wished to 
express in her greeting to America. It hap- 
pened to be the one that Bayard Taylor had 
written, and it was accordingly set to music 

6i 



RECOLLECTIONS 

by Jules Benedict, and sung by her at her 
first concert in Castle Garden. 

" Did you see the Brooklyn announcement 
of my lecture ? " he wrote to me in Novem- 
ber. " (' Bayard Taylor, the successful com- 
petitor of the Jenny Lind prize.') Is that 
song to be the only thing which will save 
my name from oblivion ? " 

I have been reading over the letters that 
Bayard Taylor wrote me at this time, and 
have been pained almost as deeply as when 
I first read them. They are darkened by the 
sickness and death of the woman he loved. 
Her health began to decline after his return 
from California. She was so ill in June that 
her physician had no hope, but in August 
she was able to make a summer trip with her 
parents. 

" Mary seems much improved by the moun- 
tain air," he wrote from New York, "and has 
herself strong hopes of her recovery. I dare 
not see anything but darkness yet, — I will 
not hope against hope and be deceived at 
last. We went to West Point, which was 
distractingly noisy and unpleasant; but, by 
a special godsend, Willis touched there acci- 

^2 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

dentally the same day, and took us to a farm- 
house back of the Highlands, where his 
family were staying, — a beautiful, quiet spot. 
I stayed two days, and then came here. I 
was up again yesterday, and will go again 
on Tuesday, when they think of leaving. 
Mary has agreed with me that it is best for 
us to be married at once, so that she can be 
with me here. The winter will not be so 
hard in the city as in the country, and then 
if she is to be taken from me we will at least 
have a few days together. It will be a sad 
bridal, I fear." He mentioned one of her 
relatives who was opposed to their marriage, 
and added, " But were we to die for it we 
could not do otherwise." 

He wrote me again in October from 
Kennett Square. There was no hope ; the 
worst was certain. She might linger, but 
death was the end. " What agony we have 
endured in talking all this over I can never 
tell, but we now look to the end with calm- 
ness, if not with resignation." 

He visited her again in November. She 
was very weak when he reached home, and 
had been growing weaker ever since. " I 

63 



RECOLLECTIONS 

found it a hard trial to see her going from 
me with so slow and certain a decay. My 
own health is already shattered, and if this 
were to last much longer it would kill me 
outright." 

As the end drew near, he strove to con- 
sole himself by looking forward to what we 
might accomplish in the future. " We must 
both cling the closer to that worship which 
is the consecration of our lives, — the un- 
selfish homage of that spirit of art and 
beauty which men call Poetry. Without 
that, I should be nothing in my present 
desolation. Let us work our way, what- 
ever the toil and sorrow, from vestibule to 
chancel, from chancel to shrine, from the 
lowest footstool of the temple to the high 
priest's place beside the altar. The same 
incense that reaches us will sanctify and 
embalm our griefs : they will share in our 
canonisation." 

Twelve days later (December 27, 1850) 
she passed through the valley of the shadow 
of death. " It is over. Perhaps you may 
already know it, but I wish to tell you so 
before we meet. She died on Saturday last, 

64 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

and was buried in the midst of that cruel 
storm on Monday. She is now a saint in 
heaven. She had no foes to pardon, and 
no sins to be forgiven." 

Such was the close of this brief episode in 
the early love-life of Bayard Taylor. How 
deeply he was moved by it the readers of his 
poetry know, for in spite of his profound 
reticence it would force itself into his re- 
membrance. It found a voice in that saddest 
of all dirges, the unnamed lyric, beginning, 
" Moan, ye wild winds, around the pane," 
in his " Autumnal Vespers " ; and in " The 
Phantom," where he describes himself sitting 
in the old homestead, where shadow and 
sunshine are chasing each other over the 
carpet at his feet. The arms of the sweet- 
briar have wrestled upward in the summers 
that have gone, and the willow trails its 
branches lower than when he saw them 
last. They strive to shut the sunshine out 
of the haunted room, and to fill the house 
with gloom and silence. Remembered faces 
come within the doorway, and he hears 
voices that remind him of a voice that is 
dumb. 

5 65 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Bayard Taylor sailed for Europe in the 
summer of 1851, and we corresponded until 
his return, toward the close of 1853. He 
wrote me from Constantinople on July 21, 
1852, and wished that I might enjoy with 
him the superb view of two continents and 
their proudest city, which he saw whenever 
he lifted his head, and that he might relieve 
his heart by letting loose a fountain of talk 
which had been sealed up for months. He 
had met with no one to whom he could speak 
of poetry and be understood, and was like a 
lover who had no confidant " God be with 
us all, and speed the time when I may see 
you, and we may gossip away the midnights 
in my lofty attic. Fields promises to have 
copies of both our books waiting for me in 
London, so that I shall see something of you 
before I reach home." 

I must have been the most negligent of 
letter-writers, for I see that Bayard Taylor 
wrote me nearly a year later, from China 
(August 13, 1853), and declared that he 
almost vowed never to write me again. 
"What a long, long time has passed since 
you last sat till the small hours in my attic ! 

66 



MY FRIEND, BAYARD TAYLOR 

Was it in this life, or a former one, that I 
knew you ? I shall be ready to greet you as 
a ghost, when I get home again, for you 
oblige me to think of you as I knew you in 
the past." 



6; 



VI 

INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

I KNOW not how it may be with others, 
but for my own part, in looking back 
over my early reading, I recall with a 
lively sense of pleasure two or three writers 
who discovered me to myself, through whom 
I was drawn from a world of ignorance to a 
world of knowledge, — from the little world 
of sensation into the large world of thought, 
— and to whom I shall always be grateful. 
The first of these writers was Willis, whom I 
have many reasons for remembering kindly. 
I have already alluded to his poem " Sat- 
urday Afternoon," which I found in a Reader, 
one Saturday afternoon, when living in 
Boston, a boy of eight or nine, with a pas- 
sion for reading. My attention was arrested 
by this piece, which I knew must be poetry, 
because the words at the ends of the lines 
jingled. It took me back to one of the 

6^ 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

pleasantest episodes of my vanished coun- 
try life, — Saturday afternoon, a half-holiday 
with which I was always delighted. I have 
never forgotten one stanza in this poem, 
which -was a notable one, in that it opened 
a new world to me, as I have previously said. 
How does this stanza run? I have it: — 

" Play on, play on : I am with you there, 

In the midst of your merry ring ; 
I can feel the thrill of the daring jump, 

And the rush of the breathless swing ; 
I hide with you in the fragrant hay, 

And I whoop the smothered call, 
And my feet slip up on the seedy floor, 

And I care not for the fall." 

Why I was impressed by this poem I 
could not have told then, — for I had never 
read any poetry before, except the lugu- 
brious Hymns of Dr. Watts, which are not 
poetry, — nor am I sure that I can tell now ; 
but, as nearly as I can make out, it was be- 
cause I felt the fidelity of the suggestions 
of childish enjoyment which the stanza I 
have quoted hints at, and of which every 
healthy, hearty country child is a fitting 
judge. The jump, the swing, the hiding 

69 



RECOLLECTIONS 

and calling, and the falling on the floor, — 
every word was a picture; and what prob- 
ably added to the charm of these pictures 
was the pleasant melody in which they were 
set. They sung themselves in my spirit's 
ear that Saturday afternoon, and, like the 
voices in an ocean shell, they have sung 
there ever since. 

The literary career of Mr. Willis was more 
brilliant at its beginning than that of any 
other American author with whom I am 
acquainted. The son of a journalist whose 
father was a journalist before him, he was 
born to the use of pen and ink, and he used 
them so effectively that he won a national 
reputation as a poet while yet in his nonage. 
That he did so — for assuredly he did so 
— may astonish the present generation of 
readers, but need not, if they will but take 
the trouble to examine the history of Ameri- 
can literature during the first three decades 
of the much-writing nineteenth century. 

We had no literature to speak of then, — 
a fact which our British cousins were in the 
habit of twitting us with ; and to write in 
the face of their insolence demanded as 

70 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

much courage as confidence. We imported 
literature from them instead of producing it 
ourselves, and when at last we did begin to 
produce it, it sought currency under their 
brands; — the old brands of Addison and 
Goldsmith in the case of Irving, and the 
new brands of Scott and Byron in the case 
of Halleck. 

One of the poets of that period — Wash- 
ington Allston — was so enamoured of Eng- 
land, where he resided several years, painting 
high-art pictures and listening to the mono- 
logues of Coleridge, that he penned a copy 
of verses in which he instructed his country- 
men that they and their kinsmen were one, 
— which was not true, since the two peoples 
were fighting each other on sea and land. 

The attitude of the American mind, and 
the absence of the critical faculty in this 
mind, at the close of the first and the open- 
ing of the second quarter of the last century, 
are apparent in the sensation which was 
created by the early poems of Willis. They 
were copied from the Boston Recorder into 
all the newspapers in the land, were cut out 
of these newspapers and pasted in scrap- 

71 



RECOLLECTIONS 

books, and, the supply of printed copies 
failing at last, they were transcribed into 
albums. They were seized upon by the 
compilers of anthologies and the makers of 
school-books, and one or more of them were, 
no doubt, reprinted in the Reader where I 
first saw the stanzas on " Saturday After- 
noon " of which I have just spoken. 

The verdict of the reading world was that 
a new poet had appeared, — a verdict that 
was accepted by the literary world, as may 
be seen in the verse which young Mr. Long- 
fellow was then contributing to the United 
States Literary Gazette^ particularly In his 
blank-verse lines on " Autumn," wherein the 
elegant touch of Willis is as clearly discerni- 
ble as the didactic touch of Bryant. 

His college days at Yale over, Willis re- 
turned to Boston, where he remained during 
the next four years, continuing the literary 
career which he had begun with his Scrip- 
ture poems. He was in demand, not only 
on his father's paper, the Boston Recorder, 
which is said to have been the first religious 
paper in the world, but on a second paper, 
The Yout/is Companion, which he started 
72 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

about this time (1827), and on The Christian 
Examiner, The Christian Watchman, and 
other sacred and secular journals. 

He was in demand, and, better still, he 
was sometimes paid twice over for the same 
productions ; for the editors of that day were 
in the habit of offering prizes at the begin- 
ning of the year for the best poems contrib- 
uted to their columns during the previous 
year, and Willis had the good fortune to 
take several of these prizes, — one for his 
Absalom," another for his " Sacrifice of 
Abraham." To no other young man did 
Boston offer such opportunities of living by 
authorship as to Willis. While he was at 
college, Bryant was desirous of making Bos- 
ton his home, but was dissuaded from the 
attempt, the chances of his earning a liveli- 
hood there by his pen were so unpromising. 

But Bryant, it may be said, was too mod- 
est, while WilHs — Stop a moment. There 
was, I admit, a difference between the two 
men ; but it was not so much one of modesty, 
or immodesty, as one of temperament and 
knowledge. Bryant was diffident, reserved, 
and ascetic ; Willis was confident, bustling, 

73 



RECOLLECTIONS 

and extravagant. The aim of one was to 
be a poet, and nothing else; the aim of the 
other was to be a poet, and a man of the 
world. 

It is well, perhaps, to estimate one's powers 
highly, for the world is apt in the long run 
to accept a man at the value that he sets 
upon himself. There was no good reason 
why Willis should not profit by his success, 
and accordingly he profited by it. To have 
cheapened himself would have been foreign 
to his wishes, his tact, his mind. He did 
not cheapen himself. 

The hour was come, and the man, — I 
mean, the man who was to give Willis's 
reputation a different direction. This man 
was Samuel Griswold Goodrich, a native of 
Connecticut, who at an early age had been 
a publisher in Hartford, had travelled in 
Europe when travelling was less common 
than now, and the year before Willis had 
left college had returned to America and 
settled in Boston, where he combined the 
business of making with the business of 
selHng books. 

Goodrich projected a multifarious person- 
74 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

ality, " Peter Parley," which soon became 
famous the world over through the books 
which he wrote, and were written for him, 
and which must have made him a great 
deal of- money. We all read " Parley " when 
we were children, and, for all I know, our 
children may be reading " Parley " now, 
though I hardly think so, since we have 
invented object-lessons and transplanted the 
kindergarten. 

It was the season of Annuals, which, in- 
troduced into England by the German 
Ackermanns, were running their rapid race 
of popularity there, under editors with an 
elegant turn of mind like Mr. Alaric A. 
Watts, who succeeded in persuading Turner, 
Leslie, Newton, and other artists of repute 
to make illustrations for them, and a good 
many authors of the minor sort to write for 
them. 

The idea of supplying the American mar- 
ket with pictorial literature of native growth 
struck two of our early publishers simulta- 
neously, — Elam Bliss, of New York, being 
one, and the indefatigable Goodrich the 
other. The venture of Bliss, which was 

75 



RECOLLECTIONS 

edited by Bryant, Sands, and Verplanck, 
was called " The Talisman," while that of 
Goodrich, which was called " The Legend- 
ary," was edited by Willis. Both appeared 
in the same year, 1828. "The Talisman" 
extended to three annual volumes ; " The 
Legendary " lived a year, and was followed 
by " The Token," the first volume of which 
was edited by Willis, and which lived four- 
teen years, at the end of which time the 
rage for these ephemera was nearly over. 
Goodrich's corps of contributors embraced 
such popular writers as Halleck, Longfellow, 
Pierpont, John Neal, Willis Gaylord Clark, 
Miss Sedgwick, Mrs. Sigourney, and Mrs. 
Hale, with other celebrities who have long 
since been forgotten. But Goodrich's great 
contributor was Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

That the genius of Hawthorne, several 
of whose " Twice-Told Tales " appeared in 
" The Token," should have escaped recogni- 
tion while the talent of Willis was at once 
acknowledged, may excite surprise, though 
it need not, if one will but stop to consider 
the marked differences between the matter 
and the manner of their writing, and the ab- 

76 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

sence of the critical faculty in average read- 
ers the world over. The majority of readers 
know what they like, but why they like, and 
whether they ought to like, are problems 
which' never trouble them. 

The history of famous authors and popular 
writers is often the history of literary mis- 
takes, and as much the mistakes of these 
authors and writers as of their readers. 
Wordsworth could not understand the rep- 
utation of Byron, neither could Southey, 
Coleridge, or Lamb. Gifford and Lockhart 
derided Keats, and Maginn disgraced himself 
by attacking Shelley; and that young Mr. 
Tennyson had reason to remember rusty, 
musty, fusty Christopher we all know. 

Hawthorne was for years, as he confesses 
in one of his charming prefaces, the most 
obscure man of letters in America. Praised 
by the English long before his own country- 
men recognised his merits, he was forty-six 
before he achieved success in " The Scarlet 
Letter." 

Willis, on the contrary, was successful 
from the beginning. There was that in his 
Scripture poems that suited the popular 

17 



RECOLLECTIONS 

taste, which was caught by their melodious 
versification and their picturesque descrip- 
tion. That they were precisely what they 
should not have been, — were artificial when 
they should have been simple, and pretty 
when they should have been severe, — in 
other words, that they violated the spirit of 
the old Biblical narratives of which they were 
a recension, — was of no consequence, since 
their admirers were not critical. 

He wrote finer poems in " Saturday After- 
noon," in " The Annoyer," and his lines " To 
a Belfry Pigeon," but they were less highly 
thought of. Young as he was when these 
compositions flowed from his pen, he was 
better equipped for the literary profession 
than any of his contemporaries. He knew 
enough to serve the purpose he had in view, 
— had an instinctive tact that supplied his 
lack of experience, insight that divined what 
would be acceptable, and capacity to create 
it if it did not exist, cleverness, adroitness, 
versatility. 

His editorial connection with Goodrich, 
and the editorship of a periodical which he 
projected at this time on his own account, 

78 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

. widened his intellectual horizon, and opened 
the way to a path of letters in which he was 
fitted to walk. Popular poet though he was, 
he had sense enough to know that he could 
not live by poetry: so he taught himself to 
write prose. He wrote tales, which bore no 
resemblance to those of Hawthorne ; dis- 
cursive essays, chatty criticisms, of the kind 
that then obtained in English magazines, 
lighter and less scholarly, but more genial 
and gentlemanly, — for, whatever may have 
been the personality he assumed, he always 
wrote like a gentleman. 

The qualities which differentiated his 
writing from the average writing of the 
period were censured by the critics, whom 
he never sought to conciliate, and his per- 
sonal bearing, which was confident and self- 
possessed, was resented and ridiculed. It is 
safer to be conventional than individual, — 
even among individual people, who, as a 
rule, are more satisfied with themselves than 
with others, and whose social charity gener- 
ally begins and ends at home. 

If Willis, as Goodrich said, had a large 
circle of steadfast friends, he had a larger 

79 



RECOLLECTIONS 

circle of steadfast enemies. His magazine 
struggled along for two years and came to 
an end. It was a benefit to him, in that it 
taught him to write prose, and an injury to 
him, in that it cost him (or his creditors) 
upward of three thousand dollars. The fail- 
ure of his clever venture sickened him of the 
censorious people of Boston, — a complaint 
to which other disappointed men of letters 
have since fallen victims. 

Shaking the hallowed dust of Beacon 
Street and the Common from his sandals, 
Willis emigrated to New York, where his 
talents found a larger field of exercise. Nine 
years before his arrival, during his Fresh- 
man year at Yale, a weekly paper had been 
started in New York, by two poets, who 
sought to maintain themselves and to in- 
struct their countrymen by blending the 
utile and the dulce in journalism. Both 
were older than he, and both had a certain 
vogue on the stage and in concert-halls. 

The elder, Woodworth, a native of Mas- 
sachusetts, had written several plays, one 
an opera, or operetta, airs from which had 
reached the little town wherein I lived in 

80 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

boyhood ; the younger, Morris, a native of 
Pennsylvania, had written a Revolutionary 
drama, and much prose and verse besides. 
The reputation of both, such as it was, 
rested on songs, — that of the one on " The 
Old Oaken Bucket," that of the other on 
" Woodman, Spare that Tree." 

The apprenticeship which he had served 
upon his moribund magazine made Willis a 
master-workman by the time he joined the 
staff of The New York Mirror, As the 
paper was not in a very flourishing condi- 
tion, its editors cast about for ways and 
means to increase its circulation and en- 
large its narrow bank-account, and it was 
resolved upon over an oyster-supper at the 
plebeian Delmonico's of that day that Willis 
should travel abroad and write letters home. 
The moderate fortune of five hundred 
dollars was somehow scraped together, and 
his passage was taken. The world was all 
before him where to choose, — to the extent 
of five hundred dollars, which he received in 
advance, and for which he was to write 
fifty letters! He was in his twenty-sixth 
year. 

6 8i 



RECOLLECTIONS 

The difference between the journalism of 
that time and the journalism of to-day is 
nowhere more striking than in the emolu- 
ments that w^ere disbursed to editors and 
contributors then. No correspondent now 
would seriously entertain a proposal to write 
fifty letters for five hundred dollars, upon 
which sum he would be expected to main- 
tain himself like a gentleman in the capitals 
of Europe. 

Willis had elegant tastes and luxurious 
habits, but he had also the economy that 
pertained to his Puritan stock, and a fund of 
good sense that never dishonoured the drafts 
that were drawn upon it. He was clever 
enough to be admired, and companionable 
enough to be liked ; so he made friends, one 
of whom — Mr. Rives, United States Min- 
ister to Paris — presented him to the Citizen 
King and attached him to his own embassy, 
a courtesy which entitled him to wear the 
uniform of a secretary of legation and to 
enter the court circles of the countries he 
visited. 

I need not trace his progresses in France, 
Italy, Greece, Constantinople, and elsewhere, 

82 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

nor analyse his " Pencillings by the Way," 
which were literally what they purported to 
be, and were so popular that they were 
copied from the columns of the Mirror 
into hundreds of city and country journals. 
American readers of the thirties were com- 
paratively untravelled, and were consequently 
interested in letters of travel. They had an 
insatiable thirst for knowledge respecting for- 
eign lands, the traditionary " want to know " 
of the Yankee infesting the race throughout 
the States. 

It was the continuance of this thirst that 
drove young Bayard Taylor to Europe some 
fifteen years later than Willis, and has since 
driven other ambitious country lads to follow 
in his footsteps. They wore no winged 
sandals on their feet, however, for they were 
not poets. Willis was the progenitor of the 
Special Correspondents of our time, and his 
correspondence anticipated their brightest 
and best work. It glanced at and over the 
surface of European life and manners, and, 
if deficient in solid information, for which he 
never cared, was not deficient in picturesque 
description and social observation. 



RECOLLECTIONS 

If Willis in his Continental letters was, 
as I have intimated, the progenitor of the 
Special Correspondent, in the English and 
Scottish letters which succeeded them he 
was the progenitor of that later, greater 
personage, — the Interviewer. These letters 
of Willis's suggest two or three questions in 
the ethics of letter-writing, and the more 
dubious ethics of journalism, which had not 
been mooted before, which have been left 
open ever since, and which have given Willis 
an unfragrant memory in the literary mind 
of England. What are the relations between 
a guest and his hosts ? Does the fact of his 
eating salt at their tables necessarily close 
his mouth and paralyse his pen, or is he 
permitted to speak, though not to write .f* 

That private persons have a right to ob- 
ject to any, the least, publicity respecting 
themselves and their affairs, is as certain, I 
think, as any obligation in the unwritten 
code of modern manners. Willis himself 
would have acknowledged this, for he was 
a well-bred man, but would have defended 
himself with the plea that Lady Blessington, 
and Moore, and Procter, and Bulwer, and 

84 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

Disraeli were not private persons, but pub- 
lic characters, who ought not to object to 
being written about in a journal which was 
published three thousand miles away and 
was hardly likely ever to reach England. 

The difference between the communica- 
tive writing of Willis and the communica- 
tiveness of his epistolary descendants is the 
difference between personal journalism and 
journalism of personality. He was the third 
American author (Irving being the first, and 
Cooper the second) who succeeded in mak- 
ing a reputation in England, where his pen 
was speedily in demand, in spite of the dis- 
favour with which some of his " Pencil- 
lings " had been received, and to whose 
leading periodicals he was a constant con- 
tributor. The society in which he moved 
was of a more showy and artificial kind than 
he had been accustomed to in America, and 
it fostered whatever was showy and artificial 
in his nature. It was a period of dandies 
and dandified writing, and it suited Willis, 
who continued its traditions after they had 
generally fallen into disuse. 

Beyond and above all other editors and 
85 



RECOLLECTIONS 

authors whom I chanced to know in my 
early years, Willis was the most watchful 
for, and the most considerate toward, young 
writers, — the most appreciative and gen- 
erous, and, better than all this, the most 
helpful. His papers were always open to 
them, and his pen always ready to praise 
them. He discovered — if the phrase be 
not too strong — Bayard Taylor, whose ju- 
venile verse I saw in the Home Journal, and 
the gentlewomen who wrote over the pen- 
names of " Fanny Forrester," " Edith May," 
and " Grace Greenwood." 

He was an authority in letters, — so much 
so that when I was eighteen or nineteen, and 
was happy only when I was manufacturing 
metrical compositions, which I copied in 
little volumes of white paper, I sent him 
one of these manuscript booklets wherein I 
had copied a late pencilling of mine, with a 
boyish note, asking him to be good enough, 
if he would, busy as he must be, to say 
whether there was, or was not, any talent 
in the same. 

I left this effusion at the office of the 
Home Journal^ in Fulton Street, where at 

m 



INFLUENCE OF N. P. WILLIS 

the expiration of a week or two I found it, 
with a brief note of indorsement from the 
pen of Willis. I lost this note years ago, 
but it read (in substance) as follows: " I 
think the writer of this poem has genius 
enough to make a reputation, but pruning, 
trimming, and condensing are necessary to 
make it what it should be, as the same 
labour was necessary to Byron's genius, and 
Moore's. It is hard work to do, and ill paid 
when done." I have found it hard work, 
and now and then me judice, ill-paid. 

Mr. Willis let me write what I would and 
as frankly as I chose to ; more frankly than 
was agreeable to the sensitive editorial soul 
of his associate, General Morris, who, as I 
have said, was a little older than he, a 
black-eyed, black-haired gentleman; there 
was something imposing and impressive in 
Morris's personal appearance. He had a 
broad, padded chest and a bulky waist, 
whose amplitude of girth was encircled by a 
military belt, which supported the long and 
dangerous weapon that dangled from it. 

The Home Journal was so considerate 
that it came to be called our " Incubator," 

87 



RECOLLECTIONS 



and was perpetually hatching out our spring 
chickens of song, whose eulogised promi- 
nence and superior plumage provoked the 
envy, the ire, and the malignity of its com- 
peting contemporaries. 



VII 

AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

I HAVE been trying to recall the cir- 
cumstances which led to my first 
meeting with Lowell, but not with as 
much success as I could wish. It was prob- 
ably through the friendly offices of Bayard 
Taylor, who thought I ought to know some 
of our elder poets. 

I know that he greatly admired Lowell, 
certain qualities in whose verse made so 
deep an impression on him that he un- 
consciously reproduced them in his own, 
and I remember that when we talked about 
" A Fable for Critics," which was published 
anonymously, he assured me that it was the 
work of Lowell. I assume, therefore, that 
some time in 1849, when I was about to 
visit Boston, Taylor wrote a note of intro- 
duction to the author of that lively satire, 
and that this note was the open sesame to 
Elmwood. 

89 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I had not met many authors then, and 
those whom I had met did not awe me, 
for, while I was ready to admit that they 
could do many things which I could not, I 
felt that I could do some things which they 
could not, so I preserved my equanimity. I 
had yet to meet my superior, and, knowing 
that Lowell was my superior, I presented 
myself at his door with considerable hesita- 
tion. It left me when I was shown into his 
study, for there was that in his pleasant 
face and kindly eye, in the grasp of his 
hand and the tone of his voice, that put 
me at once at ease. 

It was a bright forenoon, either toward 
the end of spring or the beginning of fall, 
and there was a wood fire on the hearth, not 
so much because it was needed, I thought, 
as because it made the room look cosey and 
comfortable. We were in the library, and 
there were books everywhere, in cases along 
the walls, in chairs, and on the table at which 
he wrote. We sat beside this table in the 
ruddy glow of the fire, and, lighting each a 
cigar, we smoked and talked. He asked me 
about myself, — for he had heard of me, he 

90 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

said, — and about the men of letters whom I 
knew in New York. 

I mentioned Park Benjamin, who had 
been very kind to me, and whom he prob- 
ably knew (he nodded), and Ralph Hoyt, 
whom he might know (he did not nod), 
and Hoffman, and Griswold, and Matthews, 
and the Duyckincks, of whom he also prob- 
ably knew (he nodded again), " and who cer- 
tainly know you," I was about to add, when 
I remembered that he had not acknowledged 
" A Fable for Critics," and suppressed the 
remark. 

Had I read much, and what books did I 
like most ? It was a large question, and it 
led to much talk ; for I was grateful for the 
interest in me which it manifested, and was 
curious to know what he thought of my 
reading. 

I told him that I read all the books which, 
coming in my way, interested me, and that 
most of these were in verse, for which I cared 
more than for prose. I began with the 
eighteenth-century poets, which I accepted 
at what I thought the value the world 
set upon them, but I had not read long 

91 



RECOLLECTIONS 

before I wondered at the repu'tation in 
which they were held. I found Thomson's 
" Seasons," for example, dull reading, his 
natural descriptions were so vague, and 
his language was so turgid ; and Cowper's 
" Task," apart from its pictures of nature, 
was nothing to me. 

My criticism was just so far as it went, he 
said, but it did not go far enough; for, what- 
ever might be the nineteenth-century judg- 
ment of Cowper and Thomson, they were 
important poets at the eras in which they 
flourished, since the one undermined and 
the other overthrew the school of false 
natural description which obtained among 
the poetasters of Dryden's time, and later 
modish versifiers, who wrote pastorals be- 
cause Virgil and Theocritus did, and who, 
instead of looking at nature through their 
own eyes, read it through the spectacles of 
books. How bad the best were we saw in 
"Windsor Forest." But perhaps I had not 
read the poets chronologically. 

No, I had read sporadically, just as I 
happened to get them. But no matter in 
what order I read, it seemed to me that 

92 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

most of them had no clear idea of what 
poetry was. 

Yes, he said. And what is poetry ? 

I have read many definitions, I repHed, 
but none that did not require further defi- 
nition. One definition of poetry, as I re- 
member it, is that it is something which 
cannot be so well expressed in prose as 
in verse. 

So Coleridge hinted, he answered, when 
he shaped the dictum " the best words in 
the best places." 

I had not known that, I remarked, but it 
did not strike me as favourably as Milton's 
" simple, sensuous, passionate." But we have 
only touched upon poetry as language, which 
is its form : we have forgotten its spirit, 
which is — what? He paused a moment, as 
if in serious thought, and then said : 

" Poetry, as I understand it, is the recogni- 
tion of something new and true in thought 
or feeling, the recollection of some profound 
experience, the conception of some heroic 
action, the creation of something beautiful 
and pathetic. There are things in verse 
which may be questioned, but they are not 

93 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the poetical things, are not the things which 
are Poetry. There can be no doubt about 
that, for it authenticates itself, and so abso- 
lutely that it seems not to have been written, 
but always to have been. We are not con- 
scious of Shakespeare in his great plays, but 
of Nature, whose pen and instrument he was. 
The poetry of Shakespeare and his fellow- 
dramatists," he continued, " in other words, 
the poetry of the age of Elizabeth, was 
greater than any that has been written 
since, because the Englishman of the age 
of Elizabeth was greater than any English- 
man that has lived since. He was more 
hardy and adventurous than his descend- 
ants, more resolute and reckless, more given 
to action and less to speculation, of strong 
natural parts, and no learning to speak of, 
clear-sighted, hearty in his manners, and 
plain, blunt, and idiomatic in his speech. 
If he had been other than he was, he could 
not have been the bulwark of Protestant- 
ism, could not have destroyed the Spanish 
Armada, and could not have had the Shakes- 
pearian drama." 

Among the topics on which we touched 
94 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

in our talk was the difference between im- 
agination and fancy, and the prevalence of 
the last in our verse, particularly in the 
verse of Longfellow. I could not see, I 
said,' what a poet gained by comparing one 
thing with another thing, which was either 
like it or unlike it, and which in either case 
had no business there. Comparisons re- 
tarded the movement of a poem, which, 
once begun, ought to go on to the end 
without let or hindrance. I mentioned one 
of our singers to whom a country road 
whereon no person was seen was like a 
stream without a sail, and another to whom 
a rose was like a watchfire at night, or a 
watchfire at night like a rose, I have for- 
gotten which. Fancy had its uses, no doubt, 
but when a poet compared the tin plates on 
a dresser to the shields of armies reflected 
in sunshine, he was not using but abusing 
fancy ; and when he assured us that the 
stars were the forget-me-nots of the angels, 
he might be enlarging our conception of 
angels, but he was belittling our concep- 
tions of astronomy. 

But all fancy is not open to this objection, 
95 



RECOLLECTIONS 

he observed : there were fancies which were 
noble and glorious, and he quoted three or 
four of the opening stanzas of Shelley's 
" Skylark," wherein fancy is so closely allied 
to imagination as to be inseparable from it. 

Shelley was indeed hidden in the light of 
song, I said, when his blithe spirit swelled 
with his " Skylark," but Longfellow was on 
a lower and darker plane when he wandered 
around his " Beleaguered City," which was 
not so much a poem as a prescription. It 
was compounded after a recipe, which con- 
sisted in selecting a series of material objects 
and in finding or making spiritual mean- 
ings for them, — the rushing stream of the 
Moldau representing the rushing river of 
Life, a host of spectres that beleaguered 
the walls of Prague representing a host of 
phantoms that beleaguer the human soul, 
the morning star representing faith, and so 
on, and so on. It was not a poem, but a 
forced and futile attempt at an allegory. 

Poets must do what they can, he urged, and 
we have to take things for what they are. 

True, I answered, we must judge them by 
what they are ; but when we have done that, 

96 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

we have a right to judge them by what they 
are not. What the poetry of Longfellow 
and Bryant is, or the poetry of Byron and 
Shelley is, is one thing ; but what poetry 
itself is, is quite another thing. It is more 
than the fancy of Longfellow, the medita- 
tion of Bryant, the misanthropy of Byron, 
the humanity of Shelley, or any other per- 
sonal manifestation : it is the revelation of 
ideal truth and beauty. We must not pull 
the ideal down to us, but rise to the ideal. 

He smiled in a kindly way, partly as if he 
pitied my enthusiasm and partly as if he ap- 
proved of it, and asked me what I had been 
reading lately, and what book among all that 
I had read had helped me most. 

I named a translation of a collection of 
Essays on Art by Goethe, which by its clear 
distinguishment between the Characteristic 
and the Beautiful in Art enabled me to 
understand and to value the infinite supe- 
riority of the Beautiful. 

He knew the book I meant, and advised 
me to read Goethe carefully. He also ad- 
vised me to study Dante, whom he made it 
a duty to read through once every year. 
7 97 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I wondered at this, for I never liked 
Dante myself, though I did not say so, for 
I felt that I had sufificiently exposed my in- 
tellectual emptiness and ignorance ; besides, 
I had already wasted enough of his time. 
We parted with a hearty hand-shake, and 
I returned to Boston. 

I took back with me to New York a com- 
plete collection of Lowell's verse, of which I 
had hitherto only seen portions, and studied 
it carefully. As I had already learned to 
read chronologically, I began with " A 
Year's Life" (1841), continued with "A 
Legend of Brittany" (1844), followed with 
"The Vision of Sir Launfal " (1848), and 
ended with "A Fable for Critics" (1848), 
and was thus able to trace the changes of 
his mind and work. 

I found in his first book a different theory 
than obtained among us then, a more poeti- 
cal theory, for if " Threnodia," " The Sirens," 
" The Beggar," and " Allegra " were not 
poems, they were nothing. I found in these 
poems, particularly in the first two, a lyrical 
quality which was as new in our verse 
as it was admirable: they sang themselves 

98 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

into life in jubilant melodies of their own 
making. 

I found another quality which was not 
so admirable, and which I wondered at in 
so poetical a poet, — the didactic quality. I 
could not understand why Lowell had cared 
to write " The Fatherland," " The Heritage," 
and the sonnets " On Reading Wordsworth's 
Sonnets in Defence of Capital Punishment," 
which were certainly not poems. That he 
might have inherited the habit of mind out 
of which they grew did not occur to me, for 
I was ignorant of his clerical ancestry, and 
had never heard of heredity. 

But, find what fault I might with these 
poems and others of the same class, I felt 
that there were poems in the second volume 
which he alone could have written, and which 
were of a kind that was new in American 
verse. I have in mind " Prometheus " and 
" Columbus," for which he could have had 
no model, unless he found one in Tenny- 
son's " Ulysses " and " St. Simeon Stylites," 
and which, dramatic in spirit, were as nearly 
dramatic in form as anything yet written 
in this country. 

99 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I am not criticising the poetry of Lowell 
as I now understand it, least of all am I try- 
ing to estimate his place in our literature. 
I am simply stating the impression that I 
received from his poetry after I had made 
his acquaintance, and whatever this impres- 
sion may be worth it was not derived from 
anything that I had read about him. He 
was not much written about, if my recollec- 
tion may be trusted ; in fact, no American 
poet was much written about then, except 
Longfellow, who was constantly before the 
public, and was never far in advance of his 
public. His best readers, indeed, walked 
abreast with him, and not behind him, like 
Lowell's. 

There are poets whom the critics persist- 
ently honour, and there are other poets whom 
the critics persistently neglect. Whether 
Lowell cared for criticism I have no means 
of knowing, but, remembering what our criti- 
cism was about 1850, it is safe to say that he 
could not have cared much for it. He cared 
more, I imagine, for his own opinion and 
knowledge, and preferred his books to what 
is called literary society. Like Prospero, 

100 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

he found his library dukedom large enough. 
He was an author, in the sense that Haw- 
thorne was, and Emerson and Willis were : 
he did not write for his bread, that is to say, 
nor to increase his income, but because it 
pleased him to do so. He chose his own 
subjects, his own time, and his own method 
of publication, which, as a rule, was not in 
the periodicals. 

I can recall but one paper of his in any 
of our early periodicals, and that appeared 
in Grahams Magazine for February, 1845. 
It was a critical estimate of Foe, who fur- 
nished the misinformation with which it 
abounds, and to whom it was sent with 
the following note: 

" Elmwood, Sept. 27, 1844. 

" My dear Friend, — I kept back the biog- 
raphy a short time in order to send it by a private 
hand, but it was written under many disadvantages, 
not the least of which was depression of spirits, 
which unfit a man for anything. I wish you to 
make any suggestions about it that may occur to 
you, and to reject it entirely if you do not like it. 

"' I have mentioned Chatterton in it rather too 
slightingly. Will you be good enough to modify 

lOI 



RECOLLECTIONS 

what I say of him a Httle? His * Minstrel's Song 
in Ella ' is better than the rest of his writings. 

''You will find the package at No. i Nassau 
St., up-stairs. It was intrusted to the care of C. F. 
Briggs. If his name is not upon the door, you 
will probably see the name of ' Dougherty ' or 
'Jones.' 

" As ever, your friend, 

"J. R. Lowell." 

If the readers of Lowell care to see this 
paper, which was written in his twenty-sixth 
year, they may find it in the first volume of 
the Griswold-Redfield edition of Poe. It is 
somewhat ambitious and pedantic, but it is 
appreciative and generous, and if Poe was 
not gratified by it he ought to have been. 

I did not see Lowell after the forenoon I 
spent with him until several years had passed, 
but I heard about him frequently from Tay- 
lor, who was in the habit of making pilgrim- 
ages to Cambridge. He preferred Lowell, I 
think, to all the Gamaliels at whose feet he 
sat during those reverential visits, and he 
exploited for my benefit certain acquisitions 
that he made on those occasions, mostly in 
Old English philology, wherein he was a 
novice. 

I02 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

Two or three times he brought me friendly 
messages from Lowell, and at a later period 
the promise of a copy of the privately printed 
edition of his wife's poems, one of which, 
"An" Opium Fantasy," Taylor had learned 
by heart. How did it run? — 

" Oh, it is but a little owl, 
The smallest of its kin, 
That sits beneath the midnight's cowl, 
And makes its airy din." 

I never got the book, but I got something 
else which I valued highly, and that was a 
manuscript copy of one of his sweetest poems, 
" The Shepherd of King Admetus," which 
I greatly admired for its classic grace and 
precision. He did not consider a copied 
poem an autograph, he wrote me, so he 
sent me one besides that, a part of the 
original draft of " The Courtin','' which was 
in pencil, and nearly free from erasures 
and corrections. I have these treasures still, 
but the letter which accompanied them has 
disappeared. 

I have a little note which Lowell wrote me 
in the winter of 1859 about a story which 
my wife had sent to the Atlantic Monthly, 
103 



RECOLLECTIONS 

" I read Mrs. Stoddard's story the day I got 
it," he said, " and meant to have written long 
ago. But it is so hard to be good! and if 
man be innately evil in anything it must be 
in writing letters. I like particularly the 
spirit and power shown in the story, but am 
not altogether pleased with the story as it 
now stands. Would Mrs. Stoddard be will- 
ing to modify it in certain respects? If so, 
I will send it back with my criticisms in 
detail. It is unpleasant, this playing Rhada- 
manthus all the time, and I do not wish to 
judge unless I am asked." 

Mrs. Stoddard modified her story on the 
lines advised by Lowell : it was published 
in the Atlantic Monthly, which he edited, 
and was the beginning of her career as a 
writer, which was largely due to his timely 
recognition of her talents. 

I will finish this chapter by copying an- 
other letter, which I am glad I still retain, 
for unfortunately many of my letters have 
been lost, or given away, or stolen from me. 
The letter was not addressed to me, though 
it was more or less a reply to a letter that I 
dictated to Lowell on the occasion of his 

104 



AT LOWELL'S FIRESIDE 

seventieth birthday, which was celebrated by 
one of our critical journals. 

''68 Beacon Street, 25th Feb., 1889. 

"Dear Mrs. Stoddard, — Many thanks for 
your kind note, and to Mr. Stoddard for his. I 
do not know that I have done anything specially 
meritorious in getting to be seventy, — indeed, I 
could wish that I had managed to be forty instead. 
But so many good friends write to congratulate 
me on this achievement that I must confine myself 
to saying that I am grateful, without more words. 

" I was grieved to hear of Mr. Stoddard's calam- 
ity,^ and can sympathize with him the more keenly 
that I also have been threatened with it for the last 
four years. Pray give him my kindest regards and 
thanks. He is quite right in thinking I should 

have disapproved of the s' enterprise, had I 

been forewarned of it. But it was meant kindly, 
and that goes a great way with me. 

" Faithfully yours, 

'' J. R. Lowell. 

" It pleased me, and must have pleased you, that 
your novels should have shown such vitality." 

1 The reference is to Mr. Stoddard's eyesight, which was 
seriously affected by cataract. 



105 



VIII 

EARLY LIFE OF ELIZABETH BARSTOW, 
OUR COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 

JUST about the time when the first 
Stoddard or Stoddards emigrated to 
New England, four brothers named 
Barstow concluded to do the same. They 
were of a good family in the West Riding 
of Yorkshire ; a family that figured in other 
counties in England under their original 
name of Burstow, one of them, a certain 
Robert de Burstowe, having grants made 
to him in the reign of Edward the Second. 

The Barstows came to America, as most 
Englishmen of their period did, in order to 
better their fortunes. They settled in Massa- 
chusetts, at Cambridge, Watertown, and Ded- 
ham, and pursued their avocations there and 
elsewhere. We find them as early as 1660 
in Hanover, engaged in ship-building on the 
North River, — a little stream which sepa- 
rates Hanover and Scituate from Pembroke 
106 



OUR COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 

and Marshfield. Before many years were 
over they were settled in Mattapoisett, a 
seaside town in the same county as Hing- 
ham, looking out on the Elizabeth Islands. 

Here they lived, fathers and sons, and 
built ships for the whalers of New Bedford, 
and schooners and sloops for the West 
India and coastwise traders, — lived, and 
grew rich and died, and left others of the 
name to succeed them and carry on their 
business. Here lived and died two Gideon 
Barstows, the latter of whom had a son named 
Wilson, who married Miss Betsey Drew in 
his twenty-third year, two or three years 
before my father. Captain Reuben Stoddard, 
married Miss Sophia Gurney. 

The Barstows were a prolific family, the 
great-grandfather of Wilson Barstow add- 
ing twenty-one children to the population 
of his country, and Wilson Barstow him- 
self was no exception to the rule. He had 
nine children, of whom his second daughter, 
Elizabeth, was the last survivor. She was 
born in 1823, and that our paths would ever 
cross each other was the most unlikely thing 
in the world. We had no possession in 
107 



RECOLLECTIONS 

common, except such as was attached to 
the sea through our fathers, and that was 
of the most unsubstantial kind. One was 
drifting 

" Where dreadful waves were whirled 
About the roots of the world," 

the other was alive and well, and as surely 
a prosperous gentleman as the Thane of 
Cawdor was. 

Elizabeth Barstow was one of those irre- 
pressible girls who are sometimes born in 
staid Puritan families, to puzzle their par- 
ents, and to be misunderstood. Her spirits 
were high, and her disposition wilful. She 
had a passion for reading, but a great dis- 
inclination for study. Her inferiors shot 
past her at school, and she was pronounced 
a dunce. She was sent to the best educa- 
tional establishments in New England, in- 
cluding the Wheaton Female Seminary at 
Norton, but she might as well have re- 
mained at home and rocked her brothers 
and sisters, who arrived pretty regularly at 
intervals of about two years. 

The despair of her beautiful mother, who 
io8 



OUR COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 

could not help being amused by her vagaries, 
she was the pride of her good-natured father, 
who was the magnate of the town and looked 
up to by his neighbours. She was not ap- 
proved of by her schoolmates, for she would 
not learn ; besides, she was very handsome. 
They could not imagine what men could see 
to admire in her. 

She had one friend, however, — a notable 
man in his way, though he was only the 
minister of Mattapoisett, where he was 
considered a queer old fellow. This was 
the Rev. Thomas Robbins, who was known 
to antiquarians as the author of an " His- 
torical Survey of the First Planters of New 
England," and of several sermons preached 
on special occasions. He took a fancy to 
Elizabeth Barstow when she was a child, 
and gave her the range of his library, which 
was a large one for a country minister to 
have, and which consisted chiefly of the 
classic works of the eighteenth century. 

She read Addison, Steele, and Dr. John- 
son, — the Tatler, the Spectator, and the 
Rambler; the delectable writings of Field- 
ing, Richardson, Smollett, and Sterne, — 
109 



RECOLLECTIONS 

" Tristram Shandy," " Peregrine Pickle," 
" Pamela," and " Tom Jones." She read 
"Sully's Memoirs" and the comedies of Sher- 
idan ; if the comedies of Vanburgh and Con- 
greve were there (but it is to be hoped not) 
she read those, too. She read hundreds, 
thousands of volum.es in the good doctor's 
library, which was to her a liberal education, 
and, indeed, the only education she ever had. 
Such was the life of Elizabeth Bars tow 
until her sixteenth birthday, or thereabout, 
when she saw her first live author, — Mr. 
William Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, 
poet and novelist, who was being lionised at 
Great Barrington, and whom she was to 
know years afterward. He was a shadowy 
link between Miss Barstow and me, if she 
had only known it, for he wrote his poem of 
" Atalantas " in Hingham, when I was about 
seven years old. 

I was indeed a proud man when I at last 
earned ten dollars by my poetry, but a good 
deal of a donkey, for I at once invested it in 
an accordeon for a young person with whom 
I was infatuated, 

- ITO 



OUR COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 

What with writing in Mrs. Kirkland's 
magazine, The Knickerbocker, and other 
periodicals, I saved up enough money to do 
another foolish thing, namely : to publish 
a little volume of my verses. 

I called them " Footprints." They were 
pleasantly noticed in two or three maga- 
zines ; one copy was sold ; the edition was 
committed to the flames, and there the 
matter ended. The foot of the young poet 
left no print on the sands of time, but many 
weary prints on the wet sands of the hated 
foundry. 

The publication of this little volume, fail- 
ure though it was, made me somewhat 
known among literary people. It intro- 
duced me to the notice of the great Dr. 
Rufus Griswold, whom, as I have said, I 
met at Bayard Taylor's. 

Dr. Griswold put the author of " Foot- 
prints " in a new edition of " Poets of Amer- 
ica," and told the little story of the authors 
life more beautifully than I could ever hope 
to, complimenting him on a quality which 
he never possessed, "indomitable energy," 
and on the impossible art of moulding his 

III 



RECOLLECTIONS 

thoughts into the symmetry of verse, while 
he moulded the molten metal into shapes of 
grace. He was a fine writer, was Dr. Gris- 
wold, and a judicious critic, but a knowledge 
of foundries was not one of his strong points. 

He meant well, however, and was friendly 
to me. He introduced me to the Mrs. Leo 
Hunter of the period, — a young unmarried 
lady of Celtic and American extraction, 
who wrote poetry and gave literary reunions. 
There I became acquainted with an elderly 
young woman who was somehow a friend 
of Miss Elizabeth Barstow, of Mattapoisett, 
Massachusetts, whom I ought to know. I 
bowed, no doubt, at the distinction in store 
for me, for was it not a distinction for the 
son of a sailor to know the daughter of a 
ship-builder } 

We finally met one summer evening at 
the house of the elderly young person, but 
nothing remarkable happened. It never does 
when it is expected to, and when match- 
making minds try to lead up to it. Miss 
Barstow and I were not apparently suited 
to each other. I was a penniless young 
man of about twenty-five, good-looking, it 

112 




Portrait of Mr. Stoddard in Early Manhood. 



OUR COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 

was thought, with a knack at writing verses, 
but ill-dressed, careless in my personal ap- 
pearance, and with no manners to speak 
of. She was a young woman of about the 
same age, was handsome, though a little 
faded, had a sharp tongue and off-hand 
ways, a determination of her own, and had 
been accustomed to be tenderly cared for 
all her life. The only thing we shared in 
common was love of books. 

Miss Barstow invited me to her father's 
house at Mattapoisett, to spend the F'ourth 
of July. We read and talked and walked 
and rode together, and very odd riding it 
was on my part, for I had not been on the 
back of a horse since I was a boy in Abing- 
ton. The something that was expected to 
happen before happened now, neither quite 
knew how. I thought that I had lost my 
heart, as the saying is : she knew that she 
had not lost hers, but she rather liked me, 
if only for my simplicity. 

To cut the matter short, for courtship is a 
flat affair, outside of novels, we made up 
such minds as we had that we might pos- 
sibly do worse than to marry each other. 
8 113 



RECOLLECTIONS 

So we went off together one December 
morning, in New York, and wandered into 
a fold, the shepherd of which consented to 
unite these lost lambs. In other words, we 
went to the Church of the Good Shepherd, 
the pastor of which — the Rev. Ralph Hoyt 
— found it easier to marry the poet than to 
praise his verses. 

Being married, I set resolutely to work 
to learn the only trade for which I seemed 
fitted — literature. I couldn't hope to live 
by writing poetry, so I taught myself to 
write prose, and found that I was either a 
slow teacher, or a slow scholar, probably 
both. 

The habit of writing is sometimes catching, 
as my wife finally discovered when she caught 
herself penning little essays, and poems, and 
stories, which she brought to me in fear and 
trembling. She had a fine intellect, but it 
was untrained, and all that I could do for 
her was to show her how to train it. She 
was not cursed with mediocrity, but had the 
misfortune to be original. Her growth was 
slow but sure. She produced with labour, 
but what she produced was worth the 

114 



OUR COURTSHIP AND MARRIAGE 

labour, for she became the best writer of 
blank verse of any woman in America. 

Early one June morning, in the third year 
of our married life, we found that a man- 
child had been sent to us. We thought 
him the most beautiful boy that ever lived, 
and were not alone in thinking him so. 
His face was as lovely as the face of one 
of Raphael's angels ; his hair was like sun- 
shine, and his eyes — there never were such 
heavenly eyes before. The unfathomable 
blue of the summer sky was shallow and 
pale beside them. And the child was as 
good as he was beautiful. 

When he was in his second summer he 
was taken down to Mattapoisett by his 
mother and his nurse, and I tried to con- 
sole myself during my boy's absence by 
writing a poem about a little picture which 
had been taken of him. 

Few poets' children have been more lov- 
ingly hymned than little Willy Stoddard (he 
was named Wilson, after a favourite brother 
of his mother's), except perhaps poor Hartley 
Coleridge in the frosty midnight musings of 
his erratic father. 

115 



IX 

MY ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

BEFORE I married I became ac- 
quainted with that incomparable 
writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. I saw 
him first in the summer of 1852, just after 
he became the possessor of " The Wayside." 
I was in Boston, and I happened one morn- 
ing to drop in at the bookstore of Messrs. 
Ticknor and Fields, at the corner of Wash- 
ington and School streets. There, behind a 
little green curtain, I found my good friends 
James T. Fields and E. P. Whipple. 

" We are going to Concord, to see Haw- 
thorne," Mr. Fields remarked, in a casual 
way, as if it were a daily occurrence ; " won't 
you come along ? " 

" Certainly I will, and glad to go," I an- 
swered. 

We consulted a time-table, and finding 
that we had no time to lose, we started at 
once for the train which was to bear us to 
116 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

Concord. In the train we met Colonel T. 
J. Whipple of New Hampshire, who, like 
ourselves, was going to " The Wayside." 
He had served on the staff of General 
Pierce* during the Mexican war, and as 
Hawthorne was about to write a life of 
Pierce, who had lately received the Demo- 
cratic nomination for the Presidency, he was 
en route for " The Wayside " with biograph- 
ical materials. 

We reached Concord In due time, and 
plodded along the dusty road, past Emer- 
son's house, if my memory is not at fault, 
and the " Old Manse," until we came to 
" The Wayside." It stood, and stands, on 
the high-road to Boston — the road along 
which the British soldiers marched that 
memorable April morning that ushered in 
the Revolution. It formerly belonged to 
Alcott, — " Orphic Alcott," his friends called 
him, — who had beautified it, to the best 
of his financial ability, with terraces and 
arbours, and a rustic summer-house, which 
was fast falling to decay when Hawthorne 
became possessor of the house and grounds. 
" The Wayside," as I remember it, is a 

117 



RECOLLECTIONS 

quaint and homely little building, shut off 
from the road by a low fence and a plot of 
grass. Behind it rises a sharp hill wooded 
with pines, locusts, and Norway spruce. 

Since I first saw the house a little tower, 
or elevated room, has been added to it. This 
little room, which is about twelve feet square, 
with a window on each side, is reached by 
a steep flight of narrow stairs, opening from 
the side of the upper hall. As these stairs 
are boxed in and closed by a door, Haw- 
thorne was no doubt able to maintain the 
seclusion he sought, in the last years of his 
life, in this little den of a study. He could 
write, if he felt like it ; if not, he could col- 
lect his wandering thoughts by looking out 
of his eyrie windows. Villageward he looked 
over the tops of his own trees into the tops 
of the tall elms which shade the grounds of 
his next neighbours, the Alcotts. In front 
and eastward he looked out upon meadow 
lands; to the north upon the vineyards of 
another neighbour (where originated the 
famous Concord grape), and straight into 
the thickets which fringed his hilltop, and 
which were so near that, as he sat at his 

ii8 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

work, he could see the nodding wild-flowers 
along the margin of the hill. 

The hilltop was his favourite walk, but as 
the steepness of the hillside forbade direct 
approach from the rear of the house, his 
path skirted the foot until it came near the 
angle of his grounds, where it turned, and 
taking advantage of an easier slope, wound 
its way to the summit. Here he had worn 
through the wild turf and channelled out a 
foot-track some two or three inches in the 
sandy soil. Such is " The Wayside " and its 
surroundings. 

Hawthorne met us at the door. I was in- 
troduced to him ; he greeted me warmly, and 
throwing open the door of the parlour, as I 
suppose it was, — a pleasant room on the left 
of the hall as you enter, — he told us to make 
ourselves at home, and disappeared with 
Colonel Whipple and his budget of Presi- 
dential biography. We waited in the par- 
lour a few minutes — long enough, at all 
events, for me to observe and to admire a 
Madonna of Raphael's on the wall; and as 
Hawthorne did not return, we went out to 
take a stroll over the grounds. 
119 



RECOLLECTIONS 

We ascended the hill of which I have 
spoken, — on the top of which was the tiny 
rustic summer-house, — and the characteris- 
tics of the landscape were being pointed out 
to me, when Hawthorne rejoined us, I think, 
in the summer-house. Here he began to 
talk with me, mostly about myself and the 
verses I had written, which, I was surprised 
to learn, he had read carefully. He men- 
tioned, in particular, an architectural fantasy 
that I had thrown up, and compared it with 
his own little box of a house. 

" If I could build like you," he said, " I 
would have a ' castle in the air ' too." 

" Give me 'The Wayside,'" I replied, "and 
you shall have all the air castles I can 
build." 

He recalled a short memoir of my humble 
self that he had recently read in a magazine, 
especiall}/- the portrait which accompanied 
it, and was pleased to observe that I was 
neither so old nor so ill-looking as this 
portrait had led him to expect. As we ram- 
bled and talked my heart went out toward 
this famous man, who did not look down 
upon me, as he might well have done, but 

120 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

took me up to himself as an equal and 
a friend. 

Dinner was announced, and we entered 
the house. While we were waiting, Mrs. 
Hawthorne appeared, with her daughter 
Rose, a babe in arms, and we seated our- 
selves at table ; the stately head of the 
household at one end, and opposite him 
his gracious wife. The dinner was a light 
one, consisting of the ordinary New Eng- 
land dishes, with a bottle of claret. We 
chatted, I have forgotten about what, but 
certainly not " of fate, free-will, foreknowl- 
edge absolute," but most likely about books 
and men. Dinner over, we started for Bos- 
ton, leaving Hawthorne standing in the door 
of " The Wayside." 

We sauntered out into the long and 
winding road, passing the " Old Manse," 
on which the mosses of half a century 
were still clinging, and talking pleasantly 
about the old Revolutionary days. I shall 
never forget that first visit to Concord, and 
the cordial welcome I received from Haw- 
thorne. I see him now, as I saw him then, 
a strong, broad-shouldered man, with dark 

121 



RECOLLECTIONS 

iron-grey hair, a grave but kindly face, and 
the most wonderful eyes in the world, search- 
ing as lightning and unfathomable as night. 
The next day I returned to my lodgings in 
New York, the East Side of which I had 
learned to know better than I had ever 
known the old North End of Boston. Here 
I dreamed many foolish dreams and wasted 
much paper in the manufacture of unsalable 
melodies. 

About this time, remembering from what 
I had been told that Hawthorne had served 
as a weigher in the Boston Custom-House, 
and, later, as the Surveyor at Salem, I saw 
no reason why I should not honour my 
poor country at the receipt of customs in 
New York. I mentioned this trifling in- 
tention to two or three personal friends, 
who derided the notion that I could ever 
become a man of business. Their derision 
did not dishearten me ; for, as they learned 
afterward, though a placable man, I am 
somewhat obstinate. I expressed my wish 
to Hawthorne, who promised to assist me 
toward its fulfilment. 

Not long after my visit to *' The Way- 

122 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

side " I undertook to write a series of bio- 
graphical and critical papers for a magazine 
in New York, and as Hawthorne was one of 
a number of American authors whose lives I 
had designs against, I asked him to furnish 
me with some particulars concerning him- 
self. He sent me three or four pages of 
foolscap containing the facts I sought, so 
clearly stated, and in such exquisite Eng- 
lish, that I used nearly every word of it in 
the paper I prepared. It was published a 
month or two later, and was praised by 
the newspapers, I believe. At any rate, it 
should have been, if it was not, for, criti- 
cism excepted, everything that was good 
in it was Hawthorne's. He professed to 
be pleased with it, but I suspect now that 
he was easily pleased. 

After making a copy of Hawthorne's letter 
I gave it away. I have often regretted this 
precipitate extravagance of mine, which, I 
fear, benefited nobody. Nevertheless, I do 
not really regret it as much as I supposed, 
for it was given to a gentleman who be- 
stowed upon me my first Shakespeare, and 
whose bones are now whitening in some 

123 



RECOLLECTIONS 

deep Atlantic cavern in the stormy neigh- 
bourhood of Cape Horn. 

It was winter, or wintry weather, when I 
made my second visit to Concord, for the 
ground, I remember, was covered with snow. 
It was freezing in the shade and thawing in 
the sun, and as the sun happened to shine 
that day, the walking was atrocious. Haw- 
thorne took me into his study, — a room 
similar to and opposite the parlour, — where 
a bright wood fire was blazing, and we sat 
down to discuss my prospects ; but dinner 
being announced, we postponed that mo- 
mentous discussion. We dined in the par- 
lour, where I met Mrs. Hawthorne and Una 
and Julian. 

After dinner we returned to the study, 
Hawthorne and I, where he brought out 
some strong cigars, which we smoked vigor- 
ously. Custom- House matters were scarcely 
touched upon, and I was not sorry, for while 
they were my ostensible errand there, they 
were not half so interesting to me as the 
discursive talk of Hawthorne. He mani- 
fested a good deal of curiosity in regard 
to some old Brook Farmers, whom I knew 
124 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

in a literary way, and I told him what they 
were doing, so far as I knew, and gave him 
my impressions, such as they were, of the 
individuality of each. 

He listened, with an occasional twinkle 
of the eye, and I can see now that he was 
amused by my outspoken detestation of cer- 
tain literary Philistines. He was outspoken 
too, for he told me plainly that a volume of 
fairy stories I had just published was not 
simple enough for the young, and, he might 
have added, was too simple for the old. I 
could not but agree with him, for by that 
time I wished sincerely that I had let the 
wee folk alone. 

I mentioned the biographic memoranda 
he had furnished me with, and remarked 
that my early life resembled his own. My 
father, like his father, was a Massachusetts 
sea-captain, whose loss had left my mother 
a widow with three small children, one of 
whom, like his youngest sister, never beheld 
her father's face. We fell to talking about 
the sea, and the influence it had had on the 
childhood of both, and other personal mat- 
ters which I have forgotten. What im- 
125 



RECOLLECTIONS 

pressed me most at the time was not the 
drift of our conversation, but the gracious 
manner of Hawthorne. He expressed the 
warmest interest in my affairs, and a will- 
ingness to serve me in every possible way. 
In a word, he was the soul of kindness, and 
when I forget him I shall have forgotten 
everything else. 

I have preserved but one of Hawthorne's 
letters written at this period. It is dated 
" Concord, March i6, 1853," ^^^ ^^ full of 
sagacious advice in regard to my appoint- 
ment. I was to pile up as much of a snow- 
ball as I could in the way of political interest, 
as there never was so fierce a time before 
among office-seekers ; and it would be well 
for me to go to Washington with the letter 
he enclosed. " Are you fond of brandy ? " 
he inquired. " Your strength of head (which 
you tell me you possess) may stand you in 
good stead at Washington ; for most of these 
public men are inveterate guzzlers, and love 
a man that can stand up to them in that par- 
ticular. It would never do to let them see 
you corned, however. But I must leave you 
to find your own way among them. If you 

126 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

have never associated with them heretofore, 
you will find them a new class, very unlike 
poets." He mentions having finished the 
" Tanglewood Tales," which he considered 
as fully equal in their way to " Mother 
Goose," and adds, " I never did anything 
else so well as those old baby stories." 
The gist of the letter, however, is the post- 
script, which I copy for the benefit of all 
conscientious office-seekers: 

" When applying for an office, if you are con- 
scious of any deficiencies (moral, intellectual, or 
educational, or whatever else), keep them to your- 
self, and le*: those find them out whose business 
it may be. For example, supposing the office of 
Translator to the State Department be tendered 
to you, accept it boldly, without hinting that your 
acquaintance with foreign languages may not be 
the most familiar. If this important fact be dis- 
covered afterward, you can be transferred to some 
more suitable post. The business is to establish 
yourself somehow and anyhow." 

No one except Hawthorne could have 

written so humorously and so seriously, and 

I was grateful for the hints contained in 

this precious letter. That his action in pro- 

127 



RECOLLECTIONS 

curing for me what I so earnestly desired 
was a kind one is certain. What is not so 
certain is that my desire was a wise one. 

No young men capable of manual labour, 
and but few old men, should hamper them- 
selves with public employment. This truth 
was borne in upon me during my years of 
custom-house life, which, fruitful in expe- 
riences for myself, was unfruitful for my 
fellows, who, when dismissed, spent the re- 
mainder of their days in trying to be rein- 
stated. They were generally to be found 
at the nearest pot-houses in a maudlin con- 
dition. When m.y time came, — and it came 
unexpectedly under the first administration 
of General Grant, — I accepted the fate 
which had overtaken me, and went back to 
my hack-work in New York, and, later, in 
Massachusetts. 

But to return to Hawthorne. I had the 
pleasure of seeing this great writer, — in the 
summer of 1853, shortly before his departure 
for Liverpool, — whose consulate had been 
bestowed upon him by his friend Pierce. It 
was at a hotel on Broadway, where he called 
128 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

by the invitation of Dr. Griswold on Miss 
Alice Gary, who had just come from the 
West. We said but little, for it was not to 
see me that he was there. 

Soon after the inauguration of Lincoln I 
sent Hawthorne a story in verse ^ which I had 
recently written, and which, I dare say, my 
present readers have never heard of, although 
it was reprinted in England, and translated 
into German. It is a simple story about a 
prince, who, on coming to the throne, erected 
a bell over his palace which he resolved to 
ring whenever he was happy ; and which, 
for reasons into which I need not enter 
now, was never rung till he was dead. 

Hawthorne acknowledged its receipt in 
a characteristic little note, which, I think, 
will interest those who have followed me 
thus far, containing, as it does, a reference 
to himself and his philosophy of life. 

'* I sincerely thank you," he wrote, " for your 
beautiful poem, which I have read with a great 
deal of pleasure. It is such as the public had a 
right to expect from what you gave us in years 

1 "The King's Bell," 1862, included later in Mr. Stod- 
dard's " Collected Poems." — R. H. 
9 129 



RECOLLECTIONS 

gone by ; only I wish the idea had not been so 
sad. I think FeHx might have rung the bell once 
in his lifetime, and again at the moment of death. 
Yet you may be right. I have been a happy 
man, and yet I do not remember any one moment 
of such happy conspiring circumstances that I 
could have rung a joy-bell at it." 

He mentioned " The Morgesons," which 
Mrs. Stoddard ^ had published the year be- 

1 A new edition of Mrs. Stoddard's three novels — "The 
Morgesons," "Temple House," and "Two Men" — was 
published by Henry T. Coates & Co. of Philadelphia, in 1901. 
In her preface to "The Morgesons," Mrs. Stoddard affords 
an interesting but too brief sketch of her own literary career. 
"As my stories and novels were never in touch with my 
actual life," to quote her own phrases in 1901, "they seem 
now as if they were written by a ghost of their time. It is 
to strangers from strange places that I owe the most sympa- 
thetic recognition. Some have come to me, and from many 
I have had letters that warmed my heart, and cheered my 
mind. Beside the name of Mr. Lowell, I mention two 
New England names, to spare me the fate of the prophet 
of the Gospel, — the late Maria Louise Pool and Nathaniel 
Hawthorne." 

In the critical estimate which Mr. E. C. Stedman provided 
for this new edition, he says : " If these novels had not been 
written until the tempest of the Civil War was more fully 
assuaged, — if in other respects the season had been ripe, 
they would have been received by the many as they were by 
the critical few, for what they verily were — the pioneers of 
something new and real in the novelist's art." And again, 
" Style, insight, originality, make books like ' Two Men ' 
and ' Temple House ' additions not merely to the bulk of 

130 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

fore, which he said interested him very 
much, because he thought he could recog- 
nise in it a sort of misty representation of 
his native town, and Hkewise the half-revealed 
features of people whom he had known. He 
wrote to Mrs. Stoddard, a month or two 
later, and was as outspoken to her as he had 
been to me ten years before : 

" Pray pardon me the frankness of my crude 
criticism, for what is the use of saying anything 
unless we say what we think? There are very 
few books of which I take the trouble to have any 
opinion at all, or of which I could retain any 
memory so long after reading them as I do of 
' The Morgesons.' I hope you will not trouble 
yourself too much about the morals of your next 
book; they may be safely left to take care of 
themselves." 

In March, 1864, Mr. Ticknor accompanied 
Hawthorne to New York, where I saw him 
for the last time. He was so changed from 
the strong man I had known twelve years 
before, that it pained me even to look at him. 

reading, but to literature itself; as distinct in their kind as 
' Wuthering Heights' and 'Margaret,' or even as ' P5re 
Goriot ' or ' Richard Feverel.' " — R. H. 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I saw him but once — I had not the heart to 
see him again. 

Since penning the lines above, I have 
been looking over the sketch of Hawthorne 
which I wrote in the early fifties, and in 
which I find a description of the " Old 
Manse." I have forgotten whence I ob- 
tained the particulars thereof, but without 
doubt from Hawthorne himself, to whom 
belongs whatever credit attaches to this 
vivid picture. In sight of its window lay- 
Concord River. Here, and up the lovely 
Assabet, which flows into the Concord a 
little distance from the village, he used to 
sail with EUery Channing. A lovelier stream 
than the Assabet can hardly be found. 
Down to the water's edge grow majestic 
trees, whose pendent branches dip in the 
moveless waters and drip on the white 
pond-lilies and on the red cardinal-flowers 
which illuminate the shrubbery at their feet. 
Grape-vines twine themselves around shrub 
and tree, and hang their clusters over the 
water within reach of the boatman's hand. 
Here hides the shy kingfisher, and here 
132 



ACQUAINTANCE WITH HAWTHORNE 

skims the wild duck. The pickerel leaps 
among the lilies, and the turtle suns itself on 
the rocks and roots of the trees. The Assa- 
bet is as wild now as it was three hundred 
years ago, when the Indian paddled his canoe 
along its banks. In the woods and on the 
sides of the hills which shelter the Assabet; 
in the green fields and meadows, which no- 
where in New England are so beautiful as 
at Concord ; in the orchard behind, and the 
slip of garden beside the " Old Manse," gath- 
ering his fruits, and cultivating his summer 
and winter squashes; in his little study, 
poring over rare and pleasant books, com- 
muning with Emerson or Margaret Fuller, 
Longfellow or Lowell ; happy in the bosom 
of his family, — such were the scenes and 
such the life of Hawthorne in the "Old 
Manse" at Concord. 



133 



X 

MY LIFE IN THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 

I RECEIVED from Hawthorne, either 
from his hand or through the post, 
the letter of introduction which was to 
make my fortune. It was not addressed per- 
sonally to President Pierce, who was now in 
the White House, but to one of his most 
trusted and valued advisers and counsellors, 
— the Hon. Charles G. Atherton, of New 
Hampshire. I met this gentleman during 
my first visit to Washington, and was most 
kindly received. 

The large tavern at which I was stopping, 
and which a few years later enjoyed an unen- 
viable reputation on account of its defective 
sewage, that caused the death of several 
members of Congress, and increased the 
imbecility of a Presidential candidate, was 
crowded with visitors from all parts of the 
Union. Among them was a gentleman from 
the interior of one of the Northern States, 

134 



MY LIFE IN THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 

who, having narrowly escaped impeachment 
for malfeasance in a petty office, was natur- 
ally anxious to serve his country in a lucra- 
tive position abroad. With him were his 
rustic wife and two or three fair daughters, 
who were bedizened with ribbons and laces 
and resplendent with what have since been 
termed Parisian diamonds. Their languish- 
ing glances were directed toward all who 
had, or were supposed to have, access to the 
private ear of His Excellency. 

Hawthorne's letter to Mr. Atherton did 
not make my fortune as I had hoped : so I 
returned to my literature and oatmeal in 
New York. I was not in the least dis- 
couraged, though others in my place might 
have been. My confidence in the future 
was increased by an accidental meeting 
with Colonel T. J. Whipple, who had accom- 
panied us on my first visit to Concord, 
and who was determined that I should 
have what I wanted. He wrote a letter to 
President Pierce, and, better still, to the 
Celtic Cerberus who guarded the portals 
of the White House. Armed with these, 
I started for Washington, and, presenting 
135 



RECOLLECTIONS 

myself next morning, was at once admitted 
into the Executive Mansion. 

The President received me in his private 
chamber, and, after reading the personal letter 
from my good colonel, wrote across the back 
of it an indorsement which was almost a 
command. I thanked him and departed. 
Returning to New York, I there came across 
a young gentleman whom I had met two 
or three weeks before. He undertook to 
present my credentials to the Collector, who 
sent for me, and, in the forenoon of the day 
before I was twenty-eight years old, created 
me an Inspector of Customs of the Port of 
New York. My fortune was made, after all. 

My honorarium, as the pedantic prefer 
to say instead of " wages," was three dollars 
per diem. My wife, then my bride of a few 
nionths, often recalled her wonderment when 
at the expiration of my first month I loaded 
her little hand with gold pieces. I am afraid 
our first purchases were foolish ; their bat- 
tered remains are still in our home, — they 
are two ramshackle bookcases, and there 
were but three dollars left when we had 
paid for them, but they closeted our prin- 

136 



MY LIFE IN THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 

cipal treasure of the time, — our books, — 
so we were happy. As to the three dollars, 
they slipped through our fingers into boxes 
of comfits, or perhaps some ribbons, for 
never -were there such babes in the woods 
as we, full feathered with fantasy — and 
foolishness. 

Charles F. Briggs (" Harry Franco "), — 
the editor of Holdens Dollar Magazine, 
which was the pioneer in the field of cheap 
magazines, — whom I had known some time, 
advised me to ask for a place in the Deben- 
ture Room at the Custom- House, from which 
he had recently been ejected. I followed his 
advice, and soon found myself in a basement 
at the corner of Wall and Nassau streets : the 
Custom-House then existed in sections. Mr. 
Briggs introduced me to my superior officer, 
a Mr. Henriques, whom I found surrounded 
by incapable " fogies " of all ages, — the men- 
tally lame, halt, and blind, — for the Custom- 
House was an asylum for nonentities. Going 
upstairs I saw two debenture clerks outside 
a railing within which, in masterful majesty, 
sat the great John Cochrane, who was then 
Surveyor. 

137 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I seated myself, tremulous and expectant, 
in a third chair that was within sight. Many 
men had recently been "put through a course 
of sprouts," but for some reason I was undis- 
turbed until the winter of 1870, as I have 
said, when I too was " dropped," and for words 
that I never had uttered, though I confess 
they were very like what I might have said 
had I been roused to free my mind. 

The most trusted man in the Custom- 
House in my day was Mr. Clinch. I think 
they called him " Judge." Next in impor- 
tance to him was James L. Benedict, a 
good friend of mine, who called me " Dick " 
and permitted me to call him "Jim." He 
trusted me implicitly, so when any one, 
from broker to truckman, grumbled to me 
of my own deeds, I replied, " Report me 
to Mr. Benedict." None of them followed 
my advice more than once, for "Jim" Bene- 
dict's reply was usually in language that 
seemed compounded of vitriol and cayenne 
pepper. 

Our duty was to send inspecting oflficers 
to all vessels with cargoes from other coun- 
tries, and as the " berths " of the vessels ex- 
138 



MY LIFE IN THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 

tended, even at that day, from the Battery 
to the foot of Twelfth Street on East River 
and to Gansevoort Street on North River, 
the staff was kept busy. The water-front of 
a gre^t city is the reverse of pretty, but I 
shall never forget the picturesqueness of 
some scenes in the shipping district — bow- 
sprits extending half-way across the street 
toward the warehouses ; some grim, some 
quaint, out of which brawny men were con- 
tinuously moving something; even the side- 
walk groups differed from those of every 
other part of the city. There were few 
sailors among them, for " Jack " would make 
haste to turn his back on salt water when he 
got ashore, but the longshoremen were quite 
as sturdy as any sailors ; they wore a great 
variety of garments, all of which were as 
outlandish and picturesque as stage brig- 
ands' toggery, and they mouthed strange 
pipes and strange words. 

As all roads led to Rome, so all New 
York humanity gravitated toward the Cus- 
tom- House — merchants, bankers, politicians, 
besides every one who was fit for nothing 
elsewhere, and so thought he deserved a job 
139 



RECOLLECTIONS 

in the Custom- House. Well do I remem- 
ber one Billy Mulligan, who was presented 
to me ; he had left San Francisco hurriedly 
a few months before, at the suggestion of 
the Vigilance Committee, but thought him- 
self quite good enough for New York and 
the companionship of government officials. 

But the most distinguished of all the 
visitors to the Custom- House was Isaiah 
Rynders, known all over the city as Cap- 
tain Rynders, and later as United States 
Marshal. He had a splendid swagger, a 
ready fist, an unquenchable thirst, and about 
as much conscience and sense of propriety 
as a gorilla. But he " ran with the machine," 

— that is, he was an influential member of 
the Volunteer Fire Department and he was 
a power in local politics, so he was endured 
by thousands who detested him. He took 
unto himself a wife — a very pretty one, too 

— during my Custom-House novitiate, and 
under the patronage of this distinguished 
couple my wife and I were invited to a 
ball at the Tammany Hall of the day. 

A Tammany ball was something to be 
remembered, though the memory of one of 
140 



MY LIFE IN THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 

them should suffice. There was dancing, of 
course ; there was also speech-making, prin- 
cipally by Captain Rynders and his gang. 
Toasts, generally patriotic, were proposed, 
and there never was lack of the wherewithal 
to wet them with ; there were songs, too, and 
our national hymn was roared energetically, 
though there were reasons why some of the 
singers called it the " Bar Tangled Spanner." 
Some of the guests were supposed to be ab- 
sent-minded, for in the ladies' dressing-room 
the combs and brushes were chained to the 
wall. 

I had not been long installed in the De- 
benture Room before it began to be fre- 
quented by men of letters, who found it 
convenient to remember that I was one of 
their number. I was glad to see them, 
when the unsteady pressure of business 
gave me a little leisure, and I chatted with 
them about their own writings, past, present, 
and prospective. Well known at the time, 
most of these gentlemen are now forgotten; 
they dropped in upon me at luncheon time, 
and were occasionally more thirsty than I 
could have wished. 

141 



RECOLLECTIONS 

The most illustrious was a poet from Bos- 
ton who was distinguished for his transla- 
tions from Dante; the least illustrious was a 
young poet of about my own age, who had 
come to this country during the unsuccess- 
ful Irish rebellion in 1848, and had found 
employment in reporting for two or three 
of our journals, among others the Tribu7ie, 
This young man was John Savage, whom 
everybody called " Jack," and who was as 
jolly as he was poor. He could sing a 
good song, — what Irishman ever lacked 
that accomplishment ? — and he could and 
did write airy Celtic lays by the dozen. 
His official rank was superior to mine, for 
he was a weigher, a position financially 
higher, which was probably bestowed upon 
him for writing a campaign life of Andrew 
Johnson, the Republican candidate for the 
vice presidency during the second term of 
President Lincoln. 

My good friend Benedict sent me, one 
gloomy November forenoon, this curt an- 
nouncement of a new appointment in Her- 
man Melville : " He seems a good fellow, 
Dick, and says he knows you, though per- 
142 



MY LIFE IN THE CUSTOM-HOUSE 

haps he does n't, but anyhow be kind to him 
if this infernal weather will let you be so to 
anybody." I bowed to the gentleman who 
handed the note to me, in whom I recog- 
nised a famous writer whom I had met 
some twenty-five years before ; no American 
writer was more widely known in the late 
forties and early fifties in his own country 
and in England than Melville, who in his 
earlier books, " Typee," " Omoo," " Mardi," 
and " White Jacket," had made himself the 
prose poet of the strange islands and peoples 
of the South Seas. 

Whether any of Melville's readers under- 
stood the real drift of his mind, or whether 
he understood it himself, has often puzzled 
me. Next to Emerson he was the Ameri- 
can mystic. He was more than that, how- 
ever, he was one of our great unrecognised 
poets, as he mianifested in his version of 
" Sheridan's Ride," which begins as all stu- 
dents of our serious war poetry ought to 
know : " Shoe the steed with silver that 
bore him to the fray." Melville's official 
duty during the last years of my Custom- 
House life confined him to the foot of 
143 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Gansevoort Street, North River, and on a 
report that he might be changed to some 
district on the East River, he asked me to 
prevent the change, and Benedict said to 
me, " He sha'n't be moved," and he was 
not; and years later, on a second report of 
the same nature reaching him, I saw Bene- 
dict again, who declared with a profane ex- 
pletive, " He shall stay there." And if he 
had not died about a dozen years ago he 
would probably be there to-day, at the foot 
of Gansevoort Street. 



144 



XI 

MEETINGS WITH POE 

IT was my good — or bad — fortune to 
come in contact with the unfortunate 

Edgar Allan Poe in my twenty-first 
year. Here I must premise that I had 
already met those who knew him, and was to 
meet those who had known him before and 
after. I was scarcely twenty when Wiley and 
Putnam published " The Raven, and Other 
Poems." One of my very early friends after 
Bayard Taylor was Dr. Rufus Wilmot Gris- 
wold, from whom I experienced nothing but 
personal kindness. I knew him before Poe 
died, was cognisant of his not unfriendly 
opinion of Poe, and was on terms of boyish 
intimacy with Mrs. Frances Sargent Osgood. 
Within a day or two after the death of 
Edgar Allan, I penned a copy of careless 
verses (" Miserrimus ") which had more suc- 
cess than they deserved. I mention these 

10 145 



RECOLLECTIONS 

facts to show that at various times I acquired 
some knowledge of the author of " The 
Raven." But before I proceed any further 
in this direction I must relate in as few words 
as possible my first and last acquaintance 
with this highly gifted but ill-balanced man 
of genius. 

I began to write at the time that Poe was 
editing the Broadway Journal, which was 
in 1845. Having met a lady who had had 
some verses published in the Joumal, my 
ambition was fired, and I wrote my first 
poem, " Ode on a Grecian Flute." 

Like all early writing, it was crude ; but 
there was promise in it. I worked over it, 
made a copy of it, and sent it to the editor 
of the Broadway Journal, — I presume, with 
a letter addressed to Edgar A. Poe, Esq., 
— and waited with fear and trembling. 

One week, two weeks passed, and it did 
not appear. Evidently the demand for odes 
was slack. When I could bear my disap- 
pointment no longer I made time to take a 
long walk, a hot afternoon in June, to the 
office of the Broadway Jotirnal, and asked 
for Mr. Poe. He was not in. 

146 



MEETINGS WITH POE 

Might I inquire where he lived ? I was 
directed to a street and a number that I have 
forgotten, but it was in the eastern part of 
the city, I think in East Broadway, near Clin- 
ton Street — a neighbourhood now given up 
to sundry of the tribes of Israel. I knocked 
at the street door, and was presently shown 
up to Poe's apartments on the second or 
third floor. He received me with the 
courtesy habitual with him when he was 
himself. 

I told my errand, and he promised that 
my ode should be printed next week. 1 
was struck with his polite manner toward 
me, and with the elegance of his appearance. 
He was slight and pale, I saw, with large, 
luminous eyes, and was dressed in black. 
When I quitted the room I could not but 
see Mrs. Poe, who was lying on a bed, ap- 
parently asleep. She too was dressed in 
black, and was pale and wasted. 

"Poor lady," I thought; "she is dying of 
consumption." She never stirred, but her 
mother came out from the back parlour, 
and was introduced to me by her courtly 
nephew. Breathing a benediction upon the 

147 



RECOLLECTIONS 

three, I stole downstairs, and rambled slowly 
home. 

I bought the next issue of the Broadway 
Journal^ but the ode was not in it. It was 
mentioned, however, as follows : — 

" To the Author of the Lines on the 
' Grecian Flute.' We fear that we have 
mislaid the poem." 

And a week later, this : " We doubt the 
originality of the ' Grecian Flute,' for the 
reason that it is too good at some points 
to be so bad at others. Unless the author 
can reassure us, we decline it." 

I was surprised and indignant. Any one 
in my situation would have been. Not write 
that immortal production ! why, I knew that 
I had composed it! I thought then, I thought 
afterward, and I know now, that Poe was 
no critic. Of course I called within a few 
days to authenticate my trifle. 

It was a forenoon, and a very hot one, in 
July. I plodded down from the east side of 
the town, southwardly, westwardly, through 
Lewis Street, Division Street, and Chatham 
Street, until I reached Clinton Hall, on the 
southwest corner of Beekman and Nassau 

148 



MEETINGS WITH POE 

streets. It was then past noon, and of 
course the potent editor of the Broadway 
Journal had gone out to his luncheon, with 
Briggs, or Enghsh, or some other Bohemian 
with whom he had not yet fallen out. 

" Not in, sir," ejaculated the fatuous pub- 
lisher. I walked away, and cooled myself 
by wandering in and out of the Park, on that 
intolerable July afternoon. Returning with 
my thin blood at fever-heat, I was informed 
that Poe was in his sanctu7n. He was sit- 
ting in a chair asleep, but the publisher 
awoke him. He was in a morose mood. 

"Mr. Poe," I said, "I called to assure 
you that I did write the ' Ode on a Grecian 
Flute; " 

Poe started, and glared at me, and shouted, 
" You lie, d — n you. Get out of here, or I 'II 
throw you out ! " 

I was more indignant and astounded than 
before; but I left him, as he desired, and 
walked slowly home, " chewing the cud of 
sweet and bitter fancies." I could not un- 
derstand then why I had been subjected to 
such an indignity. I tliink I can now. 
When I came to consider the matter I was 
149 



RECOLLECTIONS 

rather flattered than otherwise; for had not 
the great Poe declared that I did not write 
the poem, when I knew that I did ? What 
a genius I must be ! 

Do I blame Poe ? The gods forbid ! 
With a race of hardy New England sailors 
behind me, and behind him a stock of hard- 
drinking Marylanders, his father an ineffi- 
cient player, and his mother a fairly good 
English actress and vocalist, — who am I, 
pray, that I should censure anybody? 

My first incentive to verse was Robert 
Burns ; my second, the death of a sickly 
Methodist boy ; my third, Keats. But be- 
fore these came Shakespeare, Milton, and 
Byron. And the influence of Keats was 
greater than all in my nonage. I devoured 
" Endymion," of which I repeat by heart 
many glorious passages after all these years, 
and which I strove to imitate, as my dead- 
and-gone Ode will show, if I can ever re- 
cover it. This roundabout journey ought 
to bring me back to Poe, who was only at 
his best (as it seemed to me) in his smaller 
verses; who was 7iot a critic; and who, like 
others whom I knew before, and have known 

150 



MEETINGS WITH POE 

since, and expect to know to the end, was 
constitutionally unveracious. He, and they, 
perhaps, were unconscious. At any rate, 
the infirmity was hereditary, and therefore 
unavoidable. 

I had glimpses of Poe afterward in the 
streets, but we never spoke. The last time 
that I remember to have seen him was in 
the afternoon of a dreary autumn day. A 
heavy shower had come up suddenly, and 
he was standing under an awning. I had 
an umbrella, and my impulse was to share 
it with him on his way home, but something 
— certainly not unkindness — withheld me. 
I went on and left him there in the rain, 
pale, shivering, miserable, the embodiment 
of his own 

'' unhappy master, 
Whom unmerciful disaster 
Followed fast, and followed faster." 

There I still see him, and always shall, — 
poor, penniless, but proud, reliant, dominant. 
May the gods forgive me ! I can never for- 
give myself. 

New York has never been remarkable, I 
believe, for its love of literary men, — remark- 

151 



RECOLLECTIONS 

able, that is, as Weimar was in Goethe's day, 
and as Boston is supposed to be in our own ; 
but when Poe resided in New York there 
was a perceptible flavour of literature in its 
society. Its Mrs. Leo Hunters were at 
home on stated evenings during the winter 
months, and among the celebrities whom 
they enticed to their parlours came Poe 
and his wife. These evenings are said to 
have been delightful, but, like many other de- 
lightful things, they have left very shadowy 
recollections in the minds of those who 
shared them. What is chiefly remembered 
about Poe is that his manners were refined 
and pleasing, and his style and scope of 
conversation that of a gentleman and a 
scholar. His conversational powers are 
much dwelt upon by his followers. Mrs. 
Poe played the part of a silent and admir- 
ing listener on these occasions, winning all 
hearts with her sweet, pale, girlish face. 

It was evident to those whose perceptions 
were sharpened by experience in sick-rooms 
that she had not long to live, and it was 
equally evident that her husband was deeply 
attached to her. Friends and foes alike 

152 



/acJZCx^ — i^ //t*^ Jixa^ //tu,/ wiA ^<rt^ s£^ -^^-o ^i.<^u6^ ks>Aj ii ^/-r-UJ. 
'io.^^a ,5^ '^^"'^ /i^A^5 '««/T-^ a«K>-u-t ^ urt^tc/s ^C< ^j»,A^^ z:^ Jc^^ . 




Last Page of a Letter from Poe to F. W. Thomas, 

DATED SeI'T. 12, 1842. 



MEETINGS WITH POE 

bore testimony to this bright spot in his 
character. The natural refinement of his 
nature drew him toward women, of whom he 
was a gentle student, and in whose society 
he delighted. He was lenient to literary 
women, — more lenient in some cases than 
strict justice demanded, — so lenient, indeed, 
in general, that his criticisms upon them 
had but little critical value. He especially 
admired the graceful genius of Mrs. Osgood, 
who recorded her recollections of him in a 
tender, womanly fashion. 

Years ago I undertook to write an accu- 
rate memoir of our most subtle writer of 
psychological tales, and the most melodious 
of our lyrists. To fit myself for this task, I 
consulted the Soutkerii Literary Messenger, 
I read, by the help of Griswold, the juven- 
ilia of Poe, of which I knew a little, but not 
enough. I found his first story, his first 
poem, and later on the versicles which he 
wrote and rewrote, over and over again, sell- 
ing them each time as the latest effusions 
of his pen. 

His invention was boundless, his execution 
limited, scanty, and sparse. He repeated 

153 



RECOLLECTIONS 

himself thrice in his lines " To F. S. O.," 
and bettered them each time. It was the 
same with his stories, which he repeated 
many times, over and under many pen- 
names. This strange fact was known to 
his foes, and his friends, who conceded it, 
his friends being his worst foes, and his 
worst foes the kindest of his few friends. 
Let me say here that " The Bells " was sold 
thrice, and paid for every time ; that " An- 
nabel Lee " was sold twice, and was printed 
by Griswold before it could appear either in 
Sartahts Magazine or in the Southern Lit- 
erary Messenger, and when it possessed no 
literary value whatever. 

Griswold, who was greatly maligned, was 
the life-long friend of Edgar Allan. He 
loaned him moneys when he could ill afford 
to lose them ; yet to loan was to lose, with 
Poe. Another friend was Horace Greeley; 
others were Chas. F. Eriggs (" Harry 
Franco "), Thomas Dunn English (whom 
Poe bitterly but cleverly maligned), George 
R. Graham, L. A. Godey, John Sartain, 
Mrs. Kirkland ; all men and women most 
kindly disposed toward this unkindly per- 



MEETINGS WITH TOE 

son, who might have said more truly than 
Timon, — 

*'I am misanthropes, and hate mankind." 

That Griswold was not the enemy of Poe 
was demonstrated by the fact that he col- 
lected and edited his verse and prose for 
nothing. 

Oblivious of what I may have said, but 
fully conscious of what I mean to say, Poe 
was a curious compound of the charlatan 
and the courtly gentleman ; a mixture of 
Count Cagliostro, of Paracelsus, who was 
wisely named Bombastes, and of Cornelius 
Agrippa, — the three beings intermoulded 
from the dust of Apollonius of Tyana and 
Elymas the Sorcerer. His first master in 
verse was Byron, in prose Charles Brockden 
Brown, and later Hawthorne. 

Most men are egoists ; he was egotistical. 
His early poems are exquisite, his later ones 
are simply melodious madness. The parent 
of " Annabel Lee " was Mother Goose, who 
in this instance did not drop a golden ql^^. 
Always a plagiarist, he was always original. 
Like Moliere, whom he derided, he took his 
155 



RECOLLECTIONS 

own wherever he found it. Without dra- 
matic instinct, he persuaded himself (but 
no one else) that he was a dramatist. The 
proof of this assertion is his drama of " Po- 
litian," which was never ended, and which 
should never have been begun. 

In the late fifties I was living in Brook- 
lyn, where I met — not, I think, for the first 
time — a lady of that city, who wrote what 
she considered poetry, of which she had 
published two or three pretentious volumes. 
She was the heroine of Poe's sonnet " Sel- 
dom we find," wherein the initials of her 
name were cleverly concealed, in a sliding 
downward scale. This stellar scintillation 
whose twinkles have been extinguished, had 
one of her books illustrated by good artists, 
and her portrait painted by the best-known 
artist of that time, which portrait faced 
the title-page of one of her great booklets, 
with, I imagine, a specimen of her ragged 
penmanship. 

I called by invitation one evening at the 
domicile of this songstress, who met my wife 
and me attired in a low-necked dress of flam- 

156 



MEETINGS WITH POE 

ing crimson tarlatan, and with dishevelled 
ringlets of the kind that once were called 
golden. She began her disjointed chat with 
the remark, " I am but a child," which cer- 
tainly she was not (if she had ever been!), 
and introduced her husband, who was play- 
ing cards in his dressing-gown, and un- 
slippered. He was a good fellow, as I 
suppose, but he did not pretend to be a 
boy, though he was less elderly than his 
bedizened worser half. 

Turning from these modern antiques of 
the Wardour Street pattern, we were intro- 
duced to Mrs. Clemm, who for business pur- 
poses all round was the guest of this clever 
couple. She was less elderly than I had 
expected, and was clad in black bombazine, 
with the regulation widow's cap and white 
frills. She began by assuring me that she 
had often heard her Eddie speak of me 
(which I doubted) ; and she also declared 
solemnly that she had often heard the con- 
venient Eddie speak of the young lady who 
accompanied me (which was an impossi- 
bility). She gravely regretted to the pair 
of us her inability to supply any more auto- 

157 



RECOLLECTIONS 

graphs of her darling, but stated that she 
managed to manufacture them, since she 
could perfectly imitate his chirography. 
And all this as though it redounded to 
her credit! 

Then she glanced back, and told me of 
the long winter nights in which Poe often 
used to talk with her about the " Problem of 
the Universe,"^ while it was in progress, and 
how one winter night in particular they 
passed hours together under the glittering 
starlight, walking up and down the little 
piazza of their cottage at Fordham, he ex- 
plaining the "Cosmos"-^ to her, and she, I 
gathered, shivering with cold, though she 
would not for worlds have owned the fact. 
And further, as if there was ever present in 
her mind the necessity of saying something 
kind and motherly about him, that a single 
cup of coffee would intoxicate him, so sensi- 
tive was his nervous organization. 

But upstairs, just over where we listened 
to the old dame's prattle, was the study of 
her hostess, — a small room, with a barred 

1 The reference is doubtless to Poe's "Eureka," pub- 
lished in 1848. — R. H. 

158 



MEETINGS WITH POE 

wicket, and I have no doubt many pass- 
words. Inside there was a large blackboard, 
whereon were inscribed in the whitest of 
chalk the inspirations of this gifted creature, 
in two or three languages and several dia- 
lects. Among those which I happen to 
recollect were such Orphic utterances as 
" Sic transit gloria," " Lasciate esperanza voi 
che entrate," " Eurekem tokalos," " Quoth 
the Raven, Nevermore." It was. thus that 
singers were shapen years ago ! 

But " Eddie " was more than inconsiderate 
— he was dishonest — in his treatment of 
this patroness, who paid him one hundred 
dollars to review one of her books, and who, 
on his neglecting to do so, very naturally 
complained of him. He did not deny her 
charges, but simply remarked that if he 
reviewed her rubbish it would kill him. 
Nevertheless he did review it in the South- 
ern Literary Messeiiger and in Grahams 
Magazine, sending his notes to Bayard 
Taylor with the request that he would in- 
sert them as his own production. I had, 
before I lost it or gave it away, the letter in 
which he made this preposterous request, 

159 



RECOLLECTIONS 

which was of course complied with, and the 
tuneful soul of his gushing friend was thus 
propitiated. So unscrupulous at this period 
was the needy nature of Edgar Allan Poe. 

All this came back to me that cool sum- 
mer night in Brooklyn, when in the shabby 
back parlour of that ill-conditioned house I 
hearkened to the mendacious prattle of the 
forlorn old woman who loved her poor little 
daughter and the dead child's dead husband 
so well. Meanwhile the card-playing went 
on, with the strumming of an untuned piano 
somewhere, the jangle of a hurdy-gurdy, 
whiffs of stale tobacco, and last, — ^but this 
may be fancy, — the clangour of fire-bells 
several squares away. Home under the 
glimmer of summer stars; and so to bed 
and dreams. 



i6o 



XII 

EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

BETWEEN 1840 and 1850, when I 
had entered upon my apprenticeship 
to the seductive art of verse-making 
I was a great reader of poetry. The poets 
in whom I most delighted were those of my 
own country ; and, fortunately, of these there 
was no lack. 

The original editions which I purchased 
so cheaply then would be dear now, the pur- 
chasing of only these editions having become 
a folly among our would-be bibliographers. 
I remember to have picked up in this way, 
in my green and salad days, the metrical 
effusions of Lucretia and Margaret David- 
son, the crude and unmusical verses of Gren- 
ville Mellen, the aspiring ambitions of Rufus 
Dawes, the " Yamoyden " of Sands and his 
friend Eastburn, the poetical platitudes of 
Miss Gould and Mrs. Sigourney, and — not 
to swell too largely the catalogue of mere 
II 161 



RECOLLECTIONS 

names — an early edition of Fitz-Greene 
Halleck. Halleck's name was not a new 
one to me even at that early period, for I 
can recall reading a manuscript copy of one 
of his epistles when I was an errand-boy in 
a lawyer's office ; and I must have listened 
to his " Marco Bozzaris " at our public-school 
recitations. 

I was also familiar, through these recita- 
tions, with the address of his friend Drake 
to the American Flag. My recollection 
is that I once had a public wrestling with 
this formidable poem, and was so worsted 
by it that I retired from the stage in con- 
fusion. In what consideration these poets 
were then held, I had no means of know- 
ing, but that they had a certain vogue was 
evident from the little volume of selections 
which Mr. Bryant made from their writings 
in 1839, and from the larger and more pre- 
tentious volume collected by Dr. Griswold 
some six or seven years later. They figured 
in the pages of the Southern Literary Mes- 
senger, Graham s Magazine, Godeys Ladys 
Book, and other of our periodicals, and were 
indiscriminately lauded by newspaper critics 

162 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

on the monthly appearance of these publi- 
cations. By and by they were dropped and 
forgotten. 

To refer to the choir of singers that I 
have in mind is considered a piece of old- 
fogyism by the present race of critics, who 
can see nothing to admire in the meditative 
verse of Bryant or the picturesque balladry 
of Whittier, but everything to admire in rose- 
ate rondels, maundering madrigals, slipshod 
sonnets, and other antiquated artificialities. 
I do not share the prejudices of these young 
gentlemen, for I am old-fashioned enough 
not to be ashamed of my old taste. 

I still read Halleck, or portions of Hal- 
leck, with pleasure, and, while I am keenly 
alive to his faults, which are mainly techni- 
cal, I wish that the vein of sterling sense 
which runs through his best work was one 
of our present excellences. He had some- 
thing to say, and he said it. That he was a 
poet in any large sense is not true, neither 
is it true that he was a poet in any recondite 
sense. He should be read, as I read him, 
with a regard to the time at which he wrote, 
and the then condition of American song. 
163 



RECOLLECTIONS 

That the Hallecks were not well-to-do, in 
spite of the landed possessions that still re- 
mained in the family, or, being fairly well- 
to-do, were not averse from the thrift of the 
period, is demonstrated by the clerkly em- 
ployment of Fitz-Greene at the village store 
at Guilford. Our ancestors were not above 
economy, nor were their children unwilling 
to earn money, for their time, it must be re- 
membered, belonged to their parents until 
they came of age. That the duties of the 
mercantile life upon which he entered in 
his fifteenth year with his kinsman Andrew 
Eliot were to his tastes, is apparent, I think, 
from the fact that he transferred them six 
years later to New York, where he entered 
the counting-house of Jacob Barker, a well- 
known banker of the time, in whose service, 
and later in the service of John Jacob Astor, 
merchant and millionaire, he remained for 
about forty years. His years of routine and 
drudgery at the desks of these gentlemen in 
South Street and Prince Street, which must 
have rivalled in length those which were spent 
by Lamb in the India House, were produc- 
tive of but little literature. If he ever had 

164 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

such reveries as the gentle Elia enjoyed over 
musty old books, they died and made no sign. 
Shortly after his coming to New York 
he made the acquaintance of a young gen- 
tleman who was qualifying himself for the 
medical profession, and for whom he at once 
entertained a feeling of friendship. This was 
Joseph Rodman Drake. He was about five 
years younger than the banker's clerk, and, 
like him, was a reader of contemporary Eng- 
lish verse. They took an outing together 
one September afternoon down the waters 
of New York Bay, during which a shower 
occurred, which somehow led — through its 
brightening afterward — to a conversation 
on the delights of another world, and which 
caused Halleck to remark that it would be 
heaven to lounge upon the rainbow and to 
read Tom Campbell. This lofty wish was of 
a higher order than that of a greater poet 
than Campbell, Thomas Gray, whose ideal 
of perfect felicity was to lie on a sofa and 
to read eternal new romances by Marivaux. 
The Campbell that Halleck so absurdly 
admired, and whom he never ceased to 
admire, must have been the Campbell of 
165 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the " Battle of the Baltic," and " Ye Mari- 
ners of England," and not the feeble poet- 
aster who wrote " Gertrude of Wyoming." 

That Halleck, poet though he may have 
been, was guardedly insensible to the softer 
emotions, and sceptical of their unselfish in- 
fluence over the hearts of others, is shown 
by a passage in one of his letters to his 
sister. It referred to the marriage of his 
friend Drake — which was attributed to in- 
terested motives — with the daughter of a 
wealthy ship-builder. Mr. Halleck says: 

*' He was poor, as poets of course always are, 
and offered himself as a sacrifice at the shrine of 
Hymen, to shun the pains and penalties of pov- 
erty. I officiated as groomsman, much against my 
will. His wife is good-natured, and loves him to 
distraction. He is perhaps the handsomest man 
in New York, — a face like an angel, a form like 
an Apollo ; and, as I well knew that his person 
was the true index of his mind, I felt myself dur- 
ing the ceremony as committing a crime in aiding 
and assisting such a sacrifice ! " 

Clearly this Benedick, if he knew himself 
when he wrote, would never become a mar- 
166 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

ried man. Our poetic annals were destitute 
of notable names, and but sparsely sown with 
insignificant ones. Dwight, Trumbull, and 
Barlow had sounded the shallow sea of popu- 
lar favour with their leaden epics and had 
speedily found the bottom ; and Pierpont 
had sung his " Airs of Palestine." Drake 
had written his " Culprit Fay," which was 
still confined within the chrysalis of manu- 
script, — a dormant condition which dis- 
tinguished Bryant's " Thanatopsis," that 
illuminated the dense respectability of the 
North American Review in the following 
year. 

The contemporary poets of England were 
read with avidity, however, at that early day, 
either in reprints or in the original editions : 
Scott, Southey, Byron, and Wordsworth had 
an audience here, and such lesser singers as 
Moore and Hunt. I have among my few 
books reprints of Hunt's " Feast of the 
Poets" (1814), his "Foliage" (1818), and 
doubtless other trifles of the period. We 
depended upon London for our literature as 
absolutely as if we had been inhabitants of 
an English provincial city. 
167 



RECOLLECTIONS 

New York before the twenties was a small 
provincial city, one might almost say a small 
provincial town. It covered but a scanty 
area of ground ; it was but thinly populated ; 
but it was profoundly interested in itself and 
the doing of its denizens. The advent of 
a new aspirant for histrionic laurels at the 
Park Theatre, or the departure of an old 
favourite from the time-honoured boards of 
that temple of the drama, was chronicled 
with historic gravity in the journals of the 
day. The demolition of an old coffee-house 
or the erection of a new hotel was an event 
to be remembered, while the incoming and 
outgoing of such civic dignitaries as mayors, 
aldermen, common-councilmen, and ward 
constables were declared to be of national 
importance. There was no life in the news- 
papers except that which was injected into 
them by the malignant spirit of party poli- 
tics: they were as bitterly vindictive as our 
newspapers of to-day, but less coarsely vitu- 
perative, for Junius was still considered a 
model of political composition. 

One has to imagine such a Little Pedling- 
ton as this before one can begin to appreci- 
i68 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

ate the effect produced by " The Croaker 
Papers" of Drake and Halleck in 1819. But 
one cannot understand, at least /cannot, from 
the biographers of Halleck, or from the notes 
with which they have sought to illustrate his 
verse, why he and his young friend Drake 
should have raised a tempest in our munici- 
pal teapot at the time specified. The only 
object they had in view, beyond the laudable 
one of employing their leisure moments, was 
to raise a lausfh at some of their fellow- 
townsmen who had become ridiculous or 
reprehensible. By what principle they were 
directed in the selection of their victims, we 
are not informed, nor does it matter, the 
victims being so insignificant in themselves, 
and so little obnoxious to good morals 
or good government. Rioting in animal 
spirits, like the traditionary Celt at Donny- 
brook Fair, they struck right and left, and 
wherever they saw a head, hit it. That 
most of the heads were wooden ones, proved 
the toughness of their cudgels, but not the 
sharpness of their wit. 

" I set up for a wit, sir," said the young 
man in Boswell. 

169 



RECOLLECTIONS 

" Then I advise you to sit down, sir," 
retorted Dr. Johnson. 

These contributions to the Evening Post, 
which consisted of a number of squibs in 
anonymous verse, and which were dignified 
by the name of "The Croaker Papers," from 
the signature which the writers adopted, were 
highly thought of by the editor of that sheet, 
who, in acknowledging the receipt of the 
first three, pronounced them to be " the pro- 
ductions of superior taste and genius, and 
begged the honour of a personal acquaintance 
with the author." 

This singular indorsement of the sup- 
posed merits of the jeux-d'esprit excited 
pubHc attention to such a degree that " The 
Croakers " are said to have been a " subject of 
conversation in drawing-rooms, book-stores, 
and coffee-houses on Broadway, and through- 
out the city; they were, in short, a town 
topic," a circumstance which recalls the lit- 
erary London of Dryden, Pope, Swift, and 
Dr. Johnson, when the merits of new poems 
were discussed by wits and beaux at Will's, 
Button's, or the Mitre Tavern, and reputa- 
tions determined by men-about-town, rather 
170 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

than the unliterary New York of our grand- 
fathers. The success of " The Croakers," 
whatever it may have been, was so gratify- 
ing to the editor of the Evening Post that he 
again expressed his anxiety to be acquainted 
with the writer, this time in a style so myste- 
rious as to excite the curiosity of the authors, 
and they resolved to call upon him. 

The mistaken belief that he was, or could 
be, a humorous writer, led to the production 
of Halleck's first poem of any length, — 
" Fanny." It is possible to read " Fanny," 
as it is possible to read " The Croakers," for 
I have done both. But it is impossible — at 
least I find it so — to feel any interest therein ; 
for the analysis which could detect poetry in 
either would be rarer than the alchemy which 
was once supposed to extract sunbeams from 
cucumbers. 

What the subject-matter of such a poem 
as " Fanny " could be in the hands of a true 
poet was shown at a later period by Thomas 
Hood in " Miss Kilmansegg," and at a still 
later period by Mr. Stedman in his " Dia- 
mond Wedding." 

But Halleck was more than the would-be 
171 



RECOLLECTIONS 

wit that he still believed himself to be, and 
this fact was discovered by him when he 
came to lose his friend Drake, who died 
not long after the publication of " Fanny," 
and whose death he commemorated in some 
touching lines. They possess the merit of 
genuine feeling, — for he was truly attached 
to Drake, — and are fervid, though artless, 
in expression. Like all his serious verse, of 
which they were nearly the first example, 
they appear to have been carelessly written, 
and might have been bettered, as it seems 
to me, if he had spent more time upon them. 
They are faulty from the excess of feeling, 
and in the opening stanza they remind one 
of Wordsworth's " Lucy," which they ought 
to have equalled. 

The poetic impulses of Halleck were infre- 
quent, and not continuous. His best work 

— in other words, all his good, serious work 

— is contained within the compass of four 
or five hundred lines. His genius — for he 
had genius — expressed itself in three poems 
of moderate length : " Alnwick Castle," 
" Burns," and " Marco Bozzaris." The first 
two were written about two years after the 

172 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

death of Drake, during a short pleasure- 
trip through England and Scotland, in the 
autumn of 1822 ; the last, about a year later, 
after his return to New York and his routine 
work in the banking-house of Jacob Barker. 

I have been reading these poems recently, 
and more critically than I could have done 
years ago, and they have increased rather 
than diminished my respect for their author. 
They were remarkable, considering the time 
at which they were written, and which was 
barren of good verse of American origin. 
They antedated the best of Bryant's earlier 
poems. 

When and where I first met Halleck I 
have forgotten ; but it must have been about 
thirty years after the annus mirabilis which 
inspired this noble trio of Greek, Scottish, 
and English lyrics. It may have been in 
the editorial room of the Home Jouriial, 
where the rosy face of General Morris was 
lighted up with smiles at the unannounced 
entrance of the author of " Fanny," whom 
he w^as wont to compliment at the approach 
of each successive spring by reprinting his 
173 



RECOLLECTIONS 

airy lines, " The winds of March are hum- 
ming." Or it may have been at a small 
hotel on Broadway, whither he was brought 
by Dr. Griswold that he might pay his 
old-fashioned respects to Miss Alice Gary, 
whom the anthological doctor of the bards 
of America had introduced into the literary 
circles of New York. 

It was a very different city from the lit- 
tle Zoar of Halleck's early manhood, when 
Greenwich Street was filled with fashionable 
residences, and when Chambers Street was 
so far up town that the back of the City Hall 
was constructed of brown stone instead of 
the white marble which made its front so 
imposing. It was peopled also with a differ- 
ent race of money-makers than that of the 
Barkers and the Astors. The old order had 
changed, giving place to the new ; but, new 
or old, New York still possessed attractions 
for Halleck, to whom it was endeared by 
nearly forty years' association, and whom it 
frequently tempted from the sleepy old town 
in which he was born. 

There was between us, as he once ob- 
served, the bond of a clerkly occupation, 
174 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

and he used occasionally to drop in upon 
me at my room in the Custom-House. I 
treated him with the deference which was 
his due, and he treated me with a con- 
sideration which was hardly my due, for I 
was some thirty years his junior. Some- 
thing about him, I can scarcely say what, 
reminded me of Lamb, whose odd and 
fantastic tastes I sometimes fancied I de- 
tected in his whimsical talk. He was 
courtly and liberal in his literary opinions, 
except with regard to two English poets 
who then stood highest in popular favour, 
and who, for reasons which were incompre- 
hensible to me, were his aversion. He had 
a conventional, eighteenth-century intellect, 
and found nothing to admire, but much to 
deride, in Tennyson and Browning. Camp- 
bell still possessed the early charm for him, 
and I shall never forget the warmth with 
which he defended the character of that 
poet from the aspersions which had been 
cast upon it by his whilom understrapper 
in the management of the New Monthly 
Magazine, Cyrus Redding, to which I some- 
what injudiciously drew his attention. 

175 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Halleck was a reader of old books, and I 
of new ones, and I was sometimes enabled 
to tell him something about the latter, with 
which he could not well have become ac- 
quainted at Guilford. He was fluent and 
animated in his conversation, which was 
rather in the vein of monologue than dia- 
logue, but not so distinct in his enunciation 
as I could have wished. There was still a 
brightness in the eye over which age was 
beginning to draw its filmy curtain, and 
which sometimes seemed to emit sparks in 
the heat of talk. There was that within him 
which " o'er-informed this tenement of clay," 
though it did not wear out his pygmy body. 
For Halleck, as I recall his figure through 
the lapse of years, was somewhat diminutive 
in stature and slight of build ; and if at one 
time I was reminded of Lamb, I was re- 
minded at another of Barry Cornwall, whose 
sensitive, delicately chiselled features he ap- 
peared to possess. He was humorous in a 
certain dry way, whatever he may have been 
while writing " The Croakers," and the com- 
ing jest was sometimes detected in an antici- 
patory twist of the corners of the mouth. 

176 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

I could never beguile Halleck into speak- 
ing of his own verse, but he was cordial in 
his praise of the verse of some of his younger 
contemporaries, when what he called its 
"sense*" happened to strike him. He liked 
a bit of balladry which I dashed off on the 
death of Thackeray, with whom and whose 
work, by the way, he had no sympathy. He 
liked a more carefully considered poem which 
I wrote on the tercentennial of Shakespeare, 
and he also liked a more elaborate Horatian 
ode of mine on the assassination of Presi- 
dent Lincoln, — differing in this last liking 
of his from a well-known critic in Boston, to 
whom this production was distasteful, and 
who indignantly censured me for affixing to 
it, by way of a motto, the famous soliloquy 
of Macbeth over the taking off of Duncan, 
which was better suited, this critic declared, 
to the mouth of Lincoln's assassin than to 
the poet who pretended to weep over his 
assassination. 

My last reminiscence of Mr. Halleck does 
not relate to the poet as I knew him, nor to 
his poetry as the world has it. It is not 
personal, but posthumous, and is associated 

12 177 



RECOLLECTIONS 

with the ceremonies which were held at 
Guilford about two years after his death. 
His friends had projected a monument, and, 
unlike many such projects, which are com- 
mon enough in this country, it was com- 
pleted, and Bayard Taylor wrote the address 
which was delivered on that occasion. 

We left the city together, Taylor and 
I, proceeding by rail to Guilford. It was 
a bright summer morning, and we enjoyed 
the journey, which was enlivened with anec- 
dotes concerning the dead poet, whom Taylor 
had known long and intimately. We were 
received at the station by the committee in 
charge of the proceedings, and conducted to 
the house of one of Halleck's country neigh- 
bours, a merchant of New York, who had 
prepared for us a late breakfast — or an early 
luncheon. 

The occasion which had brought us to- 
gether can hardly have been considered a 
mournful one, in spite of its object; at any 
rate, it was not so considered by me, for, 
thanks to the brightness of the day, the de- 
lightful chat of Taylor, and the good cheer 
which was set before us, I was in excellent 

178 



EARLIER NEW YORK WRITERS 

spirits. Everybody was pleased with every- 
body else, and the necessity for life was as 
clear to us as the necessity for happiness. I 
wished that Halleck himself were present, and 
was foolish enough to say so to a solemn per- 
sonage who sat near me, and who was as un- 
imaginative as the oysters upon which he was 
feeding. I have forgotten the precise words 
of his answer, but it reminded me of the 
answer of the matter-of-fact Scotchman to 
Charles Lamb, who remarked at a dinner 
given in London to one of the surviving 
sons of Burns after his return from India, 
that he wished it was the father instead of 
the son : 

" But it cahnt be, you see, mon, for he 's 
dead!" 



179 



XIII 

BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

I HAVE been trying to remember the 
date of my first meeting with Boker. It 
could not have been earlier than 1848, 
and it must have been in the chambers of 
Bayard Taylor, which were then in Murray 
Street. I had begun to turn a narrow fur- 
row of song in the Knickerbocker Magazine, 
which was thrown open to the ploughshares 
of ambitious bardlings, who were content to 
sow their seed there, leaving the harvest, 
when there happened to be any, to be gath- 
ered and garnered by the master of the 
grange, — Mr. Lewis Gaylord Clark. He 
assisted in making the poetical reputation 
of Longfellow, whose earliest " Voices of the 
Night " he printed ; he started the vogue of 
Saxe as a comic versifier ; and he published 
more of my rhymes than he ought to have 
done. 

180 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

Everybody who cared more for glory than 
for money wrote for the Knickerbocker, — 
prosers as well as poets ; and among the 
former were two or three to whom it served 
as a stepping-stone to future distinction. 
One of these gentlemen enriched its pages 
with a story which was so imbued with the 
spirit of German fiction, as I understood this 
spirit from the translations of Carlyle, that 
I supposed him to be a German. I was de- 
ceived, as I learned when Taylor introduced 
me to him at the same time that he intro- 
duced me to Boker. 

We chatted a moment or two, — cautiously 
on my part, for I was ashamed of my ignorance, 
though I had not exposed it, — and Boker 
asked me what I was doing. It did not occur 
to me that he wished to know what I was writ- 
ing : so I mentioned my manual occupation, 
which was considerably more laborious than 
cutting off coupons. O sancta simplicitas ! 

If I were writing " Imaginary Conversa- 
tions," after the manner of Walter Savage 
Landor, or " Imaginary Biographies," after 
the manner of Sir Egerton Brydges, it would 
be easy for me to fill up the hazy outlines of 
i8i 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the conversation between Taylor, Boker, and 
myself. I shall not do so, however, for unHke 
Lamb, I profess to be a matter-of-fact and 
not a matter-of-lie man. Of course we talked 
about poetry, for two of us had published 
volumes of verse, — Taylor his " Rhymes of 
Travel," Boker his " Lesson of Life," and I, 
" Footprints," which the ripples of oblivion 
had effaced at once. Having only a slight 
acquaintance with men of letters, — poets 
like Ralph Hoyt, whose patronage was op- 
pressive, and journalists like Park Benjamin, 
whose encouragement was hearty, — I was 
honoured by the generous appreciation of 
Taylor and the graceful courtesy of Boker. 
They were older than I, — Taylor nearly six 
months, and Boker nearly two years, — and 
they were what I was not, — scholarly and 
well read. 

My lack of book-learning was a sad draw- 
back to me, though I generally contrived to 
conceal it by holding my tongue and looking 
wise. I have seen many poets in my time, 
but none that fulfilled my ideal like the 
young Taylor and the young Boker, who 
were handsome, manly fellows, with mobile 

182 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

faces, alert eyes, and crowns of the clustering 
ringlets that made the head of Byron so 
beautiful. How the two poets had become 
acquainted I have forgotten, if I ever heard ; 
but, piecing together my recollections of their 
talk in after-years, it must have been through 
" The Lesson of Life," which Taylor noticed 
in the Literary World, wherefrom he drew a 
small weekly pittance as a minor critic. 

I have been looking over Boker's letters to 
me, and have felt — I may almost say seen 
— the shadows of many years lifting from 
my mind like a curtain. They have restored 
my early manhood, and with it a thousand 
emotions that I never knew I possessed, — 
visions of happy hours when hope was strong 
within me, and memories of melancholy days 
when the future stretched before me like an 
interminable waste. But, shadow or shine, 
I followed a clew which, often hidden then, 
shines like a stray sunbeam now through the 
pages of these old letters. 

I purpose to make a series of extracts from 
these letters, and to string them as I proceed 
on a thread of comment, the strongest strands 
of which will be spun from the personality 

183 



RECOLLECTIONS 

of Boker. He had one quality which is the 
distinction of most great writers, of master- 
minds like Shakespeare, Byron, Scott, and 
Browning, — fecundity of conception and 
rapidity of execution, — and beyond all other 
American poets creation was necessary to 
his intellectual well-being. 

To begin abruptly (for some of his first 
letters must have been lost), he wrote to me 
from Philadelphia on September 5, 1849: 
'"Anne Boleyn ' will go to press about the 
20th of this month. I have received overtures 
from the Haymarket Theatre for it, and in- 
tend sending them early sheets; by which 
means I will be able to secure a copyright in 
England. I have also the assurance that 
Miss Cushman will bring it out in this coun- 
try, provided she thinks her powers adapted 
to it. We poor devils of poets are getting 
along, in a measure, you see." I was cau- 
tioned further on not to hurt the feelings of 
one of these unfortunate creatures, who was 
sensitive, and given some wholesome advice 
respecting another of the tribe, who was 
indifferent to money : " Does the Knicker- 
bocker pay you ? and does it pay you well ? 

184 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

If it does not, stop short. The world will 
hold you at whatever you rate yourself. I 
am struggling to make you a character here 
by holding your articles at a high price ; don't 
undersell me in New York and at the same 
time lower yourself." 

In his next letter, which is dated late in 
December, he tells me that " Anne Boleyn " 
is finished, and that I will find a copy wait- 
ing for me at Putnam's bookstore on the 
first of January ; that Brackett, the sculptor, 
had finished a noble bust of him, — noble, 
he means, as a work of art; and that I 
must stick to Sartazjzs Magazine, in which, 
through his influence and my own modesty, 
I can do anything in reason with its editor, 
his good, kind friend, John S. Hart, than 
whom a better man ne'er breathed God's air. 

Knowing my lack of education, I contin- 
ually sought the advice of Boker, for whose 
scholarship I had the greatest respect, and 
in whose literary judgment I knew I could 
confide. That I must have propounded 
many questions at the beginning of our ac- 
quaintance is evident from the tenor of his 
letters, in one of which, dated January 7, 
185 



RECOLLECTIONS 

1850, he wrote, " Read Chaucer for strength, 
read Spenser for ease and sweetness, read 
Milton for sublimity and thought, read 
Shakespeare for all these things, and for 
something else which is his alone. Get out 
of your age, as far as you can." 

I have frequently given the same advice 
to such of my contemporaries as have hon- 
oured me by thinking that I might possibly 
enlighten them in poetic matters, but with 
no great success, the spells of Tennyson and 
Browning are still so strong, and the spell 
of the old poets is so weak. 

I learn from his next letter, which was 
penned on February 14, that I had poured 
a flood of sweetness on him in the Tribune, 
apropos to "Anne Boleyn," who was selling 
both herself and those who bought her, and 
that he was busy with a new play, — the 
work of his poor fancy, ingeniously blended 
with his rich stealings. " It is not a tragedy, 
but a tragi-comedy." 

Four months later he gave m.e some moral 

advice, which amused me, and some literary 

advice, which I tried to follow. " There is a 

book — do not forget this — which I wish 

186 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

you and Bayard to read; nay, to study. It is 
entitled ' Harrison on the English Language.' 
The humble study of this book has done me 
more good in the way of correcting errors 
of cornposition than any book I ever read, 
and it is highly humorous withal. I am 
delighted to hear that you are engaged in 
writing songs for the Chinese. How do the 
Celestials like your poetry ? Have you a 
large and appreciative set of readers in the 
Central Flowery Land.f^ Do they sing your 
songs at Pekin ? And are they set to gongs, 
or to those small bells of silver in which the 
natives do most delight ? " I also learn 
from this letter that I wrote about Boker 
in the Albion ; that somebody had written 
about me in the Home Journal ; and that 
somebody else had written about " our trin- 
ity " — Taylor, Boker, and myself — in the 
Knickerbocker, 

This epistle was followed by another in 
which he remembered that he was just 
twenty-seven years old (October 6, 1850), 
and persuaded himself that the bells which 
he had heard all the day — it was a Sabbath 
— were rung in honour of that event. He 

187 



RECOLLECTIONS 

accused me of having tried to write him a 
"serious letter," in which I gave him to un- 
derstand that I thought but little of his 
poetry, and still less of Browning's: "You 
also had the impudence to ask me in a 
proudly humble style, ' what diction I would 
recommend for you.' I tell you — I would 
recommend a Diction-ary ; and then no one 
can complain of the dearth of your vocabu- 
lary. By adopting the diction-airy you will 
also reach a volatility which may turn your 
light-headedness into the ' fine frenzy ' with- 
out the aid of gin-and-water, which will 
shorten your poetical expenses amasingly. 
Seriously, Dick, there is, to my mind, no 
English diction for your purposes equal to 
Milton's in his minor poems. Of course any 
man would be an intensified ass who should 
attempt to reach the diction of the ' Paradise 
Lost,' or to aspire to the tremendous style 
of Shakespeare. You must not confound 
things, though. A Lyric diction is one 
thing; a Dramatic diction is another, re- 
quiring the utmost force and conciseness of 
expression ; and Epic diction is still an- 
other ; I conceive it to be something between 

i88 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

the Lyric and Dramatic, with all the luxu- 
riance of the former and all the power of the 
latter. This thing is certain, — you are now 
reaching a great age, you must have some 
principles of composition, or, my word for it, 
you will not be capable of sustaining your- 
self through a long flight. It is all stuff 
about ' singing as the birds sing,' etc. And 
grant that you can. The birds produce 
melody, harmony never. I know no man 
raore full of principles — principles which 
at times almost run into mannerisms — 
than your own dear idol, Alfred Tennyson. 
Speaking of Tennyson, is there not a world 
of beauty in ' In Memoriam '? What refine- 
ment and exactness of expression ! what 
melody in single lines ! what general har- 
mony ! what scope and richness ! what grand, 
what tender, what majestic, what childlike 
varieties in versification ! As I live, no man 
has ever rung such changes on our noble 
English, — that English which the silly 
French call harsh, — heaven save the mark ! 

— and the uningenious Germans inflexible, 

— the stiff-tongued dolts! Certainly, in all 
that pertains to the art of poetry Tennyson 

189 



RECOLLECTIONS 

is the first of English poets; but others, 
Shakespeare, Milton, etc., far excel him in 
genius. But Tennyson is not dead: what 
may we not see anon ? " 

Philadelphia at this time was the literary 
centre of the country, — the centre, at any 
rate, around which our periodical literature 
revolved in such planetary spheres as Gra- 
hams Magazine^ Sar tains Magazine, Godeys 
Ladys Book, and Petersons Magazine, each 
of which had its own belt of asteroids. 
Boker discussed the propelling spirits by 
whom these bodies were guided, or mis- 
guided, and gave me the advice of which I 
was often in need. I was informed (April 
26) that one of these gentle creatures had 
not been able for a year to make his maga- 
zine either a credit to himself or a satisfac- 
tion to its contributors, the manager of the 
concern having resolved to make the most 
money at the smallest outlay, — a mode of 
proceeding which pushed aside all articles of 
real value to give place to the gratuitous 
nonsense with which aspiring school-boys 
deluge the mail-bags of magazines. 

There was but one exception. " Graham 
190 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

is our only stand-by In these evil times. He 
is a man with a big soul, and a gentleman ; 
but his liberality, great as it is, cannot sup- 
port an author. Alas ! alas ! Dick, is it not 
sad that an American author cannot live by 
magazine-writing ? And this is wholly owing 
to the want of an international copyright law. 
Of course it is little to me whether magazine- 
writers get paid or not; but it is much to 
you and to a thousand others. Therefore I 
should be doing you and the thousand others 
the rankest injustice if I did not endeavour 
to obtain the highest price for my poems; 
for as my works rise in value, so must all 
others of a like kind. This principle is true 
in all cases ; and therefore any writer who 
does not demand the best price for his arti- 
cles is a traitor to his class." 

In his next letter (April 26), which filled 
seven closely written pages, Boker criticised 
my English with the severity that it needed, 
and, holding the art which I was trying to 
practise at a high rate, he expressed his 
reverence for poetry and poets in eloquent 
words : " We count the myriads of men that 
are and have been, by millions ; we count 
191 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the poets, as we pick out planets among the 
stars, singly and far apart. Ay, add them 
all together, and how very scanty is the 
number among all the sons of men ! What 
a wonderful, what a holy gift is this Poetry ! 
how should it not be prized, how should it 
not be cultivated ! " 

The more I read these old letters of 
Boker's the more I feel what they must 
have been to me in my poetical nonage, 
because I had come to the parting of the 
ways. My eyes were thick-sighted, and I 
was doubtful about such powers as I had. 
"Your last letter to me," he wrote (May 21, 
1852), "is full of almost unanswerable ques- 
tions. I understand perfectly the mood of 
mind in which it was written; for I, too, 
have suffered as you are now suffering; I, 
too, have endeavoured to find some test, by 
the application of which I might determine 
the exact amount of poetry existing in any 
given number of words, in the same way as 
a chemist determines the quantity of salt 
in so many drops of sea- water. My efforts, 
like yours, were designed for my own re- 
pose, and for the purpose of shaping my 

192 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

future life by their result. Mixed with 
these motives was an insatiable curiosity 
to know the precise nature of poetry, — 
scientifically, I mean, — and to be able to 
define ' that which has tripped up the un- 
derstandings of the greatest intellects that 
ever existed. For I defy you to give a 
satisfactory definition of the word 'poetry,' 
from Plato to Coleridge, — one, I mean, 
which will answer every objection. I write 
as if this state of mind were past ; but this 
is not the fact." 

I pass over a portion of this letter, as too 
personal for revelation even at this late day, 
and pick up the clew that has been dropped 
in the labyrinth of things poetical : " You 
ask me if poetry is thought. I think not; 
but thought is an essential element in 
poetry. Let me explain. Thought is to 
poetry what the bones are to the body, — 
the thing that, though invisible, and not to 
be seen without dissection, the whole struc- 
ture rests upon. Thought and design are 
one; viz., the combination of a number of ele- 
ments to produce a given effect. Without 
this design (even though it be a wicked one) 
13 193 



RECOLLECTIONS 

all the flowers of the fancy wither ; but plant 
them in it, and they take root and grow for 
ever. To settle this matter, you have only to 
look over the lives of immortal poets : who 
are they, and what is the nature of their 
poetry? Pray examine for yourself. 

" You ask if thought is not better ex- 
pressed in prose. Read Shakespeare, the 
greatest thinker among men, in a French 
translation, and you will know. Then you 
ask if poetical thought may not be expressed 
in prose. I answer, yes, when a statue or 
a picture may be expressed in prose. You 
may describe a picture in prose, or you may 
describe a poem in prose, but you cannot 
write one. Poetry, painting, sculpture, and 
music are different forms for expressing 
the same family of ideas, each art gather- 
ing around it such members of the family 
as are best adapted to its purposes. What 
is more disgusting than ' poetical prose ' 1 
It produces the same effect upon me as a 
wax figure in the place of a statue. You 
feel in reading it that the form is wrong, and 
it is in vain that you are told that the words 
are the common elements of both. Besides, 

194 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

you will always find that the writer intro- 
duces some kind of a cadence, by which he 
in a measure imitates the natural rhythm of 
genuine poetry. With me the cheat never 
answers; I feel the whole thing to be 
sham, and despise it as such. No true poet 
would write 'poetical prose,' and no false 
one can express in this hybrid form of ex- 
pression that which the poet expresses in 
his verse." 

Shortly after the beginning of the follow- 
ing year (January 12, 1853) Boker informed 
me that his "Leonor de Guzman " would be 
produced in about two months at the Wal- 
nut Street Theatre, and that he was doubt- 
ful of its success, for they had no one who 
could begin to fill the role of the heroine. 
" Theatricals are in a fine state in this coun- 
try ; every inducement is offered to me to 
burn my plays as fast as I write them. Yet 
what can I do ? If I print my plays, the 
actors take them up, butcher, alter, and 
play them, without giving me so much as a 
hand in my own damnation. This is some- 
thing beyond even heavenly rigour; and so 
I proceed to my own destruction, with the 
195 



RECOLLECTIONS 

proud consciousness that, at all events, it is 
my own act. A propos, have you ever read 
the English acting copy of my ' Calaynos ' ? 
A viler thing was never concocted from like 
materials. The alterations of Shakespeare 
and his brother dramatists are a joke to it. 
I can imagine no better fun than for a dis- 
interested cynic to sit down and to compare 
the acting copy with the original. " 

Never having written a play myself, and 
being fully determined never to write a play, 
I wondered at Boker's persistence, which, 
however, I could not but admire, it was so 
characteristic of his stubborn Dutch cour- 
age. There was no such word as fail in 
his bright lexicon, wherein failure was ham- 
mered into success. I was not surprised to 
learn, therefore, as I did, before two months 
were past (March 3), that he had a new 
tragedy on the anvil. " You will laugh at 
this," he wrote, " but the thing is so. ' Fran- 
cesca da Rimini ' is the title. Of course you 
know the story, — every one does ; but you, 
nor any one else, do not know it as I have 
treated it. I have great faith in the suc- 
cessful issue of this new attempt. I think 

196 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

all day, and write all night. This is one of 
my peculiarities, by the bye : a subject seizes 
me soul and body, which accounts for the 
rapidity of my execution. My muse resem- 
bles a whirlwind: she catches me up, hur- 
ries me along, and drops me all breathless 
at the end of her career." 

Before two months were over, Boker wrote 
me that he had met my friend Dean, a well- 
known manager of the period, who seemed 
desirous to have a play for his daughter 
Julia, and to whom as well as to his family 
he was soon to read " Leonor." Early in 
the autumn (October 9) he narrated his 
success in Philadelphia, and his failure in 
London : *' You need not be anxious about 
' Leonor ; ' we had her out last Monday, 
and she was as successful as you or I could 
hope for. Miss Dean, so far as her physique 
would admit, played the part admirably, 
and with a full appreciation of all those 
things which you called its beauties. . . . 
' Leonor ' will be brought to New York dur- 
ing Miss Dean's next engagement there, in 
November next, if nothing should happen 
to prevent it." 

197 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I have quoted largely from these early 
letters of Boker, with the design of showing 
into what intellectual intimacy our acquaint- 
ance speedily ripened, by what high motives 
he was actuated, and what ideals he steadily 
held up before himself. I felt then, and 
feel now, that his work was not understood 
as it should have been, and that the recep- 
tion which was accorded to it was far short 
of its deserts. 

He was the creator of our Poetic Drama, 
which began with " Calaynos " and ended 
with " Konigsmark." That his tragedies 
were capable of effective representation was 
known to those of us who saw Mr. Dav- 
enport and Miss Dean in " Francesca da 
Rimini " years ago, and is known to those 
of us who, later, saw Mr. Barrett and Miss 
Wainwright in the same play. The concep- 
tion of his tragedies and comedies, their 
development, their movement, and their ca- 
tastrophes, are dramatic. Poetical, they are 
not overweighted with poetry; emotional 
and passionate, their language is naturally 
figurative, and the blank verse rises and falls 
as the occasion demands. One feels in read- 

198 



BOKER AND HIS LETTERS 

ing them that the writer had studied the 
Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists, and 
that they harmed as well as helped him. If 
he could have forofotten them and remem- 
bered only his own genius, his work would 
have been more original. A born dram- 
atist, he was a genuine balladist, as I could 
prove by comparing his ballads with those 
of Macaulay, and a born sonneteer, as I 
could prove by comparing his sonnets with 
those of Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, and 
Shakespeare. 

I seldom or never read old letters ; and 
when I do, I am both old and young, Senex 
and Juventus. With this little portfolio in 
my hand, I am twenty-five, and I am forty- 
two. Nay, I am older ; for the letters ceased 
not until I was near, or fully, forty-five. 
Whenever I glance at the portfolio I think 
of the hours and the days when Boker was my 
guest wherever I was living, — in the crowded 
streets of New York, in the lonely streets of 
Brooklyn, and again in the more crowded 
streets of New York. He peoples all the 
rooms that I have occupied, with my wife, 
my children, my friends, — with Taylor, with 
199 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Stedman, with himself. The last time when 
I saw him was at the funeral of Taylor, at 
Cedarcroft, in 1879. We rode to the grave, 
on a hillside, and we rode back to the 
house. 



200 



XIV 

READ'S HOME AT BORDENTOWN 

FAIRLY familiar from boyhood with 
the poetry of Bryant and Longfellow, 
which I did not value as I ought to 
have done, my heart went out to a younger 
brood of singers, with whom I was becoming 
acquainted through the newspapers, and who 
I fancied surpassed their elders in the fresh- 
ness and richness of their poetic gifts. I 
was moved by the verse of Bayard Taylor, 
and by the verse of Thomas Buchanan Read, 
before I knew either poet, though I had 
heard that both were young, and were natives 
of Chester County, Pennsylvania. 

I cannot remember which of Read's early 
poems I first read, though clearly it must 
have lacked the simplicity and sincerity of 
Taylor's stanzas, or I should not have for- 
gotten it. But, whatever it was, it must have 
been written early in the forties, when Read 
was living in Boston, where his young Muse 

20I 



RECOLLECTIONS 

was beginning to twitter under the wing of 
Longfellow, who encouraged its short flights, 
and who could hardly have failed to recog- 
nise in his vivacious little follower a stunted 
eidolon of himself. If the worldly circum- 
stances of the young poet had been as 
favourable to the cultivation of his powers 
as those of the elder, he might, I think, even 
at that early date, have written as well as his 
master, who, like the gentlemen of England 
in the old song, lived at home at ease, and 
devoted all his energies to verse. Read was 
not a prosperous gentleman, like the lord 
of the old Vassall House, but a struggling 
artist, whose bread was earned by the inces- 
sant painting of portraits. 

It was the misfortune of Read that he 
could not confine himself to the thing that he 
could do best, — painting, poetry, or what- 
ever else that thing might be. Painting and 
poetry are sister arts, we are told, but they are 
not so sisterly as to accept and to reward the 
divided allegiance to their wooers. Painters 
should be painters, and poets poets, for as 
painters and poets are made now none is 
large enough to be both at the same time. 

202 



READ'S HOME AT BORDENTOWN 

To be a jack-at- all-trades is not to be an 
artist, for the artist is the man with a single 
aim and ambition, a single passion and de- 
termination, a single life, which must be 
lived out in its own way, and at any cost. 

" Who is this man Read ? " was asked at 
the Century, shortly after the celebration of 
the seventieth birthday of Bryant, at which 
Read was present, with other men of letters, 
and where he was discussed, as Bryant him- 
self was, and Emerson, Taylor, Boker, and 
the rest. " Who is Read ? " demanded an 
inquisitive Centurion: "the painters won't 
have him, I find, and the poets won't have 
him : what is he, pray ? " I declined to dis- 
cuss Read's pictures, with which I was not 
familiar ; but I denied, in toto, that he was 
rejected by his fellows of the singing guild. 
I mention this circumstance to show the dis- 
advantage under which Read laboured among 
those who did not know him and his work. 

My habit of reading old magazines was 
rewarded at one time, by my coming upon 
the track of Read month after month therein, 
and by my renewing acquaintance with some 
of his poems which I had forgotten, the re- 
203 



RECOLLECTIONS 

reading of which carried me back to the time 
when I first knew Read, and Taylor, and 
Boker, and other good fellows who have 
since passed into the silent land. " I, too, 
was an Arcadian," I thought, with a melan- 
choly smile, for I recalled the days when I 
used to pipe among these young shepherds 
of song, and one day in particular which I 
spent with Read at his home, and about 
which I once wrote a careless paper in one 
of these same old magazines that did not 
long survive my luckless contributions. 

I am not certain of the time or place of 
my first meeting with Read, but it must have 
been before he went to Europe, for I remem- 
ber to have gone down the bay with Taylor 
on the steamer he sailed in, and to have re- 
turned with Taylor on a little tug. I shall 
never forget that tug, partly because the 
wind on its deck was so high, and so violent 
in its vagaries, that it suddenly snatched off 
my hat, which went rapidly seaward in the 
wake of the steamer, and partly because there 
was nothing on board to eat except raw salt 
pork, of which I had to partake, or go hun- 
gry, — as Taylor did, for touch the flesh of 

204 



READ'S HOME AT BORDENTOWN 

the swine he would not. When we reached 
the city one of the crew loaned me a tar- 
paulin hat, weighing pounds and pounds, 
crushed under which I stole homeward at 
dusk, slinking through as many maritime 
neighbourhoods as possible. Read's voyage 
to Europe was more fortunate to him than 
to me, for I lost my hat, while he found his 
laurels. 

In 1853 I was invited with my wife to visit 
Read and his wife at their home in Borden- 
town. We were to come, if convenient, on 
a certain Friday forenoon in the latter half 
of April, and Read, who was slaving at his 
pencil in Philadelphia, would join us in the 
afternoon. " I will stay at home on Satur- 
day," he wrote, " and we will all go fishing, 
and on Sunday we will angle in those deeper 
and more shadowy pools which are only to 
be found in the streams of the poet's fancy." 

If I had ever been skilled in topography, 
I dare say I could reconstruct our itinerary 
across the meadows and through the towns 
of New Jersey that sunny April morning, 
but, never having possessed that accomplish- 
ment, I shall not attempt to do so here. I 
205 



RECOLLECTIONS 

was never an observant traveller, but one to 
whom most journeys by rail are singularly 
alike : besides, this occurred a lifetime ago. 

The train slowed up at Bordentown, and 
almost before we left it, went whirling away 
westward, leaving us standing on the long 
platform, like grown-up Babes in the Wood. 
We climbed a flight of steps, and, guided by 
such directions as we could obtain in the 
street above, found our way to the poet's 
home. An old-time country house, with a 
yellow brick front, and sides of red clap- 
boards, it stood at the end of the town, on 
a piece of high ground, overlooking the 
river, near which was its garden, which, to 
eyes accustomed to the small spaces of great 
cities, appeared a large one. It was not in 
what the thrifty rustic mind would consider 
a state of cultivation, — certainly not of prof- 
itable cultivation ; violets were plentiful every- 
where, lilacs, almond-blossoms, and rose-trees 
not yet in bloom. Neglected, though not 
abandoned, nature had reclaimed her early 
dominion, and the old garden, left to itself, 
had gone back to its own wild ways. 

Mrs. Read was not at home to receive us, 
206 



READ'S HOME AT BORDENTOVVN 

as we had supposed she would be, nor was 
Read himself, who, however, according to his 
own arrangement, was not to be there until 
later in the day. But something had altered 
this arrangement, possibly the absence of a 
sitter, so he had returned before our arrival, 
and, tempted, no doubt, by the fine weather, 
had gone off fishing with his wife for an hour 
or two, leaving word with his servant that we 
were expected, and he hoped we would make 
ourselves comfortable. If I had not learned 
before this time that the engagements of 
poets and painters were not to be measured 
by appointed hours and days, but by whims 
and impulses that make them as changeable 
as movable feasts, my temper might have 
been ruffled. As it was, I smiled sardoni- 
cally, and we entered the parlour of Read, 
from which we saw the table set in the back 
dining-room, and into which was wafted the 
odour of the coming dinner. 

We were soon seated at the table with 
Read's two daughters, Alice and Lilian, con- 
cerning whom our first and last thought was 
that they were very small children for such 
a very large house. The elder, Alice, who 
207 



RECOLLECTIONS 

was seven or eight, was a graceful, womanly 
little person, cool and self-collected, with a 
prim, staid demeanour, a certain gravity in 
conversation, and that sleepless conscious- 
ness of self which we sometimes see in the 
young. Wise beyond her years, she knew 
that her " papa " had written verses about her, 
and she meant to write verses herself. 

Lilian, who was three or four years 
younger, might have strayed out of fairy- 
land, she was so quaint, so curious, so fan- 
tastic. She was so light and airy that we 
almost feared to touch her, lest she should 
come to pieces in our hands, or, weary of so 
rough a world as ours, suddenly remember 
and return to her ethereal kinsmen. She 
had long, straight white hair, great staring 
blue eyes, large, round, and cold as jewels, 
and a colourless face that might have been 
carved out of marble. Her voice, which 
was soft and low like that of Cordelia, was 
musical as the piping of a bird. I never 
until a few years later saw so fair and frail, 
so lovely and exquisite a child, or one of 
whom I could so truly say, as Ben Jonson 
said of his lily of May: — 
208 



READ'S HOME AT BORDENTOWN 

" Although it fall and die that night, 
It was the plant and flower of light. 
In small proportions we just beauties see ; 
And in small measures life may perfect be." 

The Reads returned late in the afternoon, 
dusty and heated, for the weather had been 
warm, and rather out of sorts because they 
had caught no fish. " They would n't bite 
to-day," the luckless angler observed, " and 
they won't bite to-morrow, I know : so we 
won't go fishing then, but do something 
else instead." We proceeded to the table, 
and if we had been astonished at noon at 
the size of the children, we were quite as 
much astonished at night at the size of 
the parents, who, like the children, seemed 
to be playing at housekeeping. 

How we passed the next day I do not 
clearly remember, except that we did not 
go fishing, but remained indoors most of 
the time, our number being enlarged by the 
society of one of Read's admirers, to whom 
that old house at Bordentown was evidently 
an Abbotsford. He had been honoured not 
long before by having a poem addressed to 
him personally, and he was conscious of the 
14 209 



RECOLLECTIONS 

distinction, for it was a distinction, the poem 
being a charming one. There was a good 
deal of talk that day, but the substance of it 
has escaped my memory, for, as Madame de 
Stael observed of the talk of Coleridge, it 
was not so much dialogue as monologue. 

My recollection of Bordentown, through 
which I rambled on the following day with 
Eead, is confined to a visit to the Bonaparte 
estate, which some years before was cut up 
into building-lots, that had destroyed its 
primitive picturesqueness, and swept away 
the Bonaparte mansion, upon the site of 
which the then owner of the estate, an Eng- 
lish gentleman, had built a large stone villa 
in the Italian style, the glaring white of whose 
brand-new walls was out of keeping with the 
ruinous old grounds about it ; and, later in 
the day, a saunter along the brow of a hill 
in the neighbourhood of Read's house. 

Below this hill the river stretched away in 
the distance, and across it, over a long, irreg- 
ular, ragged line of houses, trees, and woods, 
hung the western sky, painted and illuminated 
with red and gold, and flushed with a green 
radiance that shifted and faded in the blue 

210 



READ'S HOME AT BORDENTOWN 

of night. Under us, on the glassy surface of 
the river, we saw the pencilled outline of its 
banks, where a few vessels were anchored 
amid the wavering shadows of thin long 
spars ' and black ropes, and where there 
were ghostly buildings wherein lights were 
bes^innino: to twinkle. 

It was an evening to be remembered, so 
miraculous was its wedding of light and dark- 
ness, so exquisite its interfusion of tints and 
tones, and so perfect the repose in which it 
was entranced. I began to express the rap- 
tures which I felt, but Read stopped me 
laughingly, as Byron stopped Moore when 
he was about to admire the rosy sunsets 
of Venice (" Damn it, Tom, don't be poeti- 
cal "), so I ceased, and we strolled homeward 
silently. I never heard Read say a word 
that would indicate he was a painter, nor — 
now I think of it — a word that would indi- 
cate he was a poet. He might not have 
cared for his painting, but he must have 
cared for his poetry. 

That Read was a poet there can be no 
doubt, but his poetry was a gift, not an art, 
and he failed in accomplishing what was 

211 



RECOLLECTIONS 

clearly within his limitations through his 
inaptitude for reflection, investigation, and 
study. That Poetry is something other 
and better than the language in which it is 
expressed, and that in this language there 
is a choice of words that express lights and 
shades of meaning, is a truth that he never 
learned. He wrote from instinct and im- 
pulse, not from knowledge, and he wrote 
easily and carelessly. Moved by fancy rather 
than feeling, his verse was often smothered 
by the fancies with which it was bestrewn. 
Predominance of the fanciful over the im- 
aginative was the poetic vice of the period 
here, and Read revelled in it, carried away 
by the example of its master, Longfellow, 
who was never so much himself as when he 
was indulging in a profusion of similes. 



212 



XV 

GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

GIVEN the books of a man, it is not 
difficult, I think, to detect therein 
the personality of the man, and the 
station in life to which he was born. Genius 
creates, of course, and sympathises with what 
it creates; it invents incidents which have 
never befallen its possessor, and conceives 
characters dissimilar to his own ; still, when 
all is done, we are never so far imposed upon 
as to mistake its fancies for facts. There is 
something in truth that is not to be found 
in the most plausible of fictions — an air of 
genuineness that can never be successfully 
simulated. 

We feel what is true in books, as we feel 
what is true in men. I am not certain, in- 
deed, that we do not feel it more surely, and 
with more pleasure to ourselves. We never 
fall out with books, for example ; but where 
213 



RECOLLECTIONS 

is the man who has not fallen out with a 
friend? I can imagine that I might have 
fallen out with Thackeray, though I have 
never fallen out with his books. They will 
not let me, they are so true, so large, so 
worldly-wise. They are not only the man 
Thackeray, but they are the epitome of 
his period and place — the England of the 
nineteenth century. 

The success which attended Thackeray's 
lectures in England and Scotland led him to 
think that we might like to hear them in 
America, and he accordingly determined to 
visit us. He arrived in Boston on a frosty 
evening in November, 1852. His lectures 
were a success, and Thackeray was delighted, 
boisterously so, according to Mr. James 
T. Fields/ who assures us that Thackeray 
shouted and danced when he was told that 
the tickets to his first course of readings 
were all sold. 

Thackeray came to New York, and read 
his lectures before the Mercantile Library 
Association with great success. That terror 
of the public man, the interviewer, was not 

^ " Yesterdays with Authors." 
214 




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J^..x 



c^i *,6-t. 






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Lr-iw/iu 



Thackeray's Portrait and Autograph Pokm, which hung abovk 
Mr. Stoddard's Desk for many years. 



GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

as yet, but his place was partially supplied 
by the inaccurate biographer and the imagi- 
native word-painter. Every characteristic of 
Thackeray was noted, and once, at least, he 
was well described : " As for the man himself 
who has lectured us, he is a stout, healthful, 
broad-shouldered specimen of a man, with 
cropped greyish hair, and keenish grey eyes, 
piercing very sharply through a pair of spec- 
tacles that have a very satiric focus. He 
seems to stand strongly on his own feet, as 
if he would not be easily blown about or 
upset, either by praise or pugilists ; a man 
of good digestion, who takes the world easy, 
and scents all shams and humbugs (straight- 
ening them between his thumb and forefinger) 
as he would a pinch of snuff." 

There was something in Thackeray's read- 
ing which no one caught. It defied analy- 
sis, and evades memory. His voice, as I 
recall it, was at once low and deep, with 
a peculiar and indescribable cadence ; his 
elocution was matchless in its simplicity. 
His attitude was impressive and tranquil, the 
only movement of his hands being when 
he wiped his glasses as he turned over the 
215 



RECOLLECTIONS 

leaves of his manuscript. He read poetry 
exquisitely. 

He was more widely read at this time in 
America than in England, for when it was 
known that he was coming over to visit us 
there was a rapid disinterment and republi- 
cation of his early writings in Eraser and 
Punch, His avant-couriers were Mr. Yel- 
lowplush, Mr. Titmarsh, Mr. George Fitz- 
Boodle, and that prince of swindlers, Barry 
Lyndon. He was not consulted with regard 
to their appearance, for he would doubtless 
have objected to one or two whom he had 
not set eyes upon for years. The Yellow- 
plush who had lampooned Bulwer was one. 
After his arrival in New York, Thackeray 
wrote a preface to " Mr. Brown's Letters," 
in which he expressed contrition for these 
wild performances of his early years, as 
he called them, and hinted that the retro- 
spect they awakened was anything but gay. 

Thackeray was dined and wined until he 
was more than content with American hos- 
pitality. He took naturally to men of his 
own profession — authors and artists — and 
in their society was the gayest of the gay. 
216 



GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

The Century was a favourite place of resort 
with him in the winter evenings, and he 
used to say it was the best club in the 
world. As the creator of Brown the elder 
and the author of " The Book of Snobs " 
was a notable club man, we Centurions were, 
and still are, inclined to believe that he was 
correct in his estimate of it. He came and 
went when he would, and his moods were 
respected ; if he was solitary, he sat down in 
some unfrequented corner, and nobody mo- 
lested him ; if he was communicative, he 
pulled his chair up where his friends were 
conversing, and joined in the conversation. 
He was a delightful talker, because he never 
talked for effect ; and as the night wore on, 
and only a few Centurions remained, he 
would tell stories, and sing songs, and set 
the table in a roar. Now it was the ditty of 
the Reverend Dr. Luther that he sang, with 
its rollicking chorus, 

" Who loves not woman, wine, and song. 
He is a fool his whole life long ; " 

and now it was his inimitable ballad of 

" Little Billee," and his miraculous escape 

217 



RECOLLECTIONS 

from the cannibalistic hunger of guzzling 
Jack and gorging Jimmy. The geographical 
outlook toward the close was immense : — 

" Billy went up the main-top-gallant mast, 
And down he fell on his bended knee ; 
He scarce had come to the Twelfth Commandment, 
When up he jumps — ' There 's land, I see. 

" ' Jerusalem and Madagascar, 

And North and South Amerikee ; 
There 's the British flag a~riding at anchor, 
With Admiral Napier, K.C.B.' 

" So when they got aboard of the Admiral's, 
He hanged fat Jack and flogged Jimmee ; 
But as for little Bill, he made him 
The captain of a seventy-three." 

On one occasion Thackeray was invited 
to a dinner at the house of a prominent 
Centurion, who was soon to rank among 
" Members Deceased." Fitz-Greene Halleck 
was present, and Hackett the comedian, and 
" Sparrow-grass " Cozzens, and half a dozen 
other good fellows of that ilk. The host 
was aware of Thackeray's curiosity in re- 
gard to our oysters, and he procured from 
the immortal Dorlon, of Fulton Market, 
some of the largest and fattest ones that 
3i3 



GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

he could obtain. A plate of them was, 
of course, placed before the guest of the 
evening. 

" Thackeray, what do you think of our 
oysters ? " asked Cozzens. Thackeray did 
not reply. 

" Press that question," said Halleck to his 
next man, who repeated it, in the words of 
Cozzens. Thackeray smiled, and placing 
his spectacles on his nose, looked down 
upon his plate. 

" Why, they are perfect beasts of oysters ! " 
They were eaten, nevertheless. This anec- 
dote is trivial, no doubt, but it is not more 
trivial than some of the apocryphal anecdotes 
of Shakespeare which are handed down to 
us, and which we are fain to believe, be- 
cause we think they are characteristic of 
that myriad-minded man. 

Thackeray made many warm friends in 
America during his first tour, in the dif- 
ferent cities in which he lectured, but none 
by whom he was more valued than Mr. 
William B. Read, of Philadelphia, who col- 
lected his reminiscences of this great writer 
in a charming little monograph. " He 
219 



RECOLLECTIONS 

seemed to take a fancy to me and mine," 
writes Mr. Read, " and I naturally loved him 
dearly. He used to come to my house, 
not the abode of wealth or luxury, almost 
every day, and often more than once a day. 
He talked with my little children, and told 
them odd fairy tales. And I now see him 
(this was on his second visit) one day in 
Walnut Street, walking slowly with my 
little girl by the hand — the tall, grey- 
haired, spectacled man with an effort ac- 
commodating himself to the toddling child 
by his side ; and then he would bring her 
home. And one day when we were to 
have a great dinner at the club given to 
him, and my wife was ill, and my house- 
hold disarranged, and the bell rang, and I 
said to him, ' I must go and carve the boiled 
mutton for the children, and take for granted 
you do not care to come,' he got up, and, 
with a cheery voice, said, ' I love boiled mut- 
ton, and children too, and I will dine with 
them.' And we did; and he was happy, 
and the children were happy, and our ap- 
petite for the dinner was damaged. Such 
was Thackeray in my house." 

220 



GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

• I met Thackeray twice when he was in 
this country, — once at a press dinner, which 
was given to him at the Astor House, and 
to which he came late, having just arrived 
from a 'journey. He was too ill to seat him- 
self, though he entered the room in which 
the dinner was held, and my remembrance 
is that he shook hands cheerily with the 
friends who were nearest him, and was 
then borne off to bed. He was liable to 
sudden attacks of severe illness, and his 
sufferings on these occasions were terrible. 
We all regretted his absence — none more 
than myself, for I wanted to see and to hear 
the satirical historian of the Four Georges. 
(It was during his second visit here, in 
1855, I have forgotten to say.) We had a 
dull evening — at least I did, for I came 
to be introduced to Thackeray, and the 
genial, friendly talk of Washington Irving, 
to whom I was introduced instead, did not 
console me for my disappointment. This 
was the only time I ever met Washington 
Irving. 

A few days later I was in the editorial 
rooms of the Tribune, where I met my 

221 



RECOLLECTIONS 

good friend Ba3^ard Taylor, who had been 
disappointed, like myself, at the press din- 
ner, and he told me that he was going to 
give Thackeray a breakfast at Delmonico's 
on the Sunday morning following,— Sunday 
being the only day that was at his disposal, 
— and he asked me to be present. How 
well I remember that memorable morning, 
and how little I brought away from it ! 

It was late in December — a bright, sharp 
morning, and the walk from my rooms to 
Delmonico's was inspiriting. We met in 
Delmonico's parlour, some eight or ten of 
us, — the Howadji, I think, was one, — and 
waited until Thackeray, who was stopping 
at the Clarendon, came. I was introduced 
to him informally. He gave me the grip 
of his hearty hand, and we proceeded to 
the breakfast-room. I forget how we were 
placed at the table, nor does it matter. It 
was Thackeray that I came to see — that I 
wish to remember — not my right nor left 
hand man, who, I have no doubt, was an 
author or an artist. It was the author of 
" The Newcomes " that I wished to hear 
talk. As I am not a gourmand, I cannot 

222 



GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

remember whether the oysters were large or 
small, nor the order in which the wines were 
brought on, thouorh I can remember that the 
proper order was discussed while we were 
sipping "them. 

Breakfast over — and it was a long one — 
we lighted our cigars, changed chairs with 
each other, and chatted in groups of twos 
or threes. I took an empty chair beside 
Thackeray, as he motioned me to do, detect- 
ing, no doubt, the admiration that I felt for 
him, and we had a pleasant chat. He had 
no idea that I hoped to be a man of letters 
some day, so we talked like men of the 
world, on whatever topic presented itself. 
Something that I said about theatricals (I 
was a dramatic critic at the time) led him to 
say that he had written a comedy, which he 
had left in Webster's hands — I think it was 
Webster's, though it may have been Wigan's 
— with but small chance of its acceptance. 

I very honestly told him that I could not 
understand how he should have a play re- 
fused. He said he could, he had had so 
many things declined — "Vanity Fair," for 
example ; besides, he added, there might be 
223 



RECOLLECTIONS 

some defect in the play which would pre- 
vent its successful representation. 

Dumas was mentioned, and I noticed that 
in speaking of him Thackeray gave his 
name the Spanish and not the French pro- 
nunciation. He had chaffed Dumas, I re- 
membered, in " The Paris Sketch-Book," but 
it was for his dramas, not his novels. I 
asked him what he thought of the latter, 
especially " Monte Cristo " and " The Three 
Guardsmen." No one ever displayed, he 
thought, such prodigality of invention as 
Dumas. His novels were vastly entertain- 
ing. For himself, he was never weary of 
reading " Les Trois Mousquetaires." 

The exact language in which Thackeray 
expressed his admiration for Dumas has 
passed from my recollection, but the sub- 
stance of it afterward took this form in 
print: "Of your heroic heroes, I think our 
friend Monseigneur Athos, Comte de la 
Fere, is my favourite. I have read about 
him from sunrise to sunset, with the ut- 
most contentment of mind. I have passed 
through many volumes — forty ? fifty ? I 
wish from my heart there were a hundred 
224 



GLIMPSES OF THACKERAY 

more, and would never tire of him rescuing 
prisoners, punishing ruffians, and running 
scoundrels through the midriff with his 
most graceful rapier. Ah! Athos, Porthos, 
and Aramis, you are a magnificent trio ! " 

The feeling with which Thackeray in- 
spired me was extravagant, I suppose, but 
it was very sincere. I felt toward him as 
he felt toward Shakespeare : " I should like 
to have been Shakespeare's shoe-black, just 
to have lived in his house, just to have 
worshipped him, just to have run on his 
errands, and seen that sweet, serene face." 
Somebody interrupted our chat ; we sep- 
arated, shook hands when the company 
dispersed, and — I never met Thackeray 



agam. 



" Ah, did you once see Shelley plain ? 
And did he stop and speak to you ? 
And did you speak to him again ? 
How strange it seems, and new !" 



225 



XVI 

THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

HOW well I knew Mr. Bryant, or how 
well any one who was some thirty 
years his junior could know him, 
are questions which I am not able to solve. 
Unfitted, as I have to confess myself, by a 
temperament which in no respect corre- 
sponded with his calmer and graver person- 
ality, I have, nevertheless, the qualification 
of understanding the strict, stern, hard life 
which was his inheritance, and the peculiar 
race that moulded it and him. Only an 
American born in the same region of coun- 
try as he, and under the same domestic and 
moral conditions, can have the clew to his 
nature. 

The State which gave him birth had not 

changed much from what it was when I 

had the infelicity to open my childish eyes 

therein, though it was somewhat modified 

226 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

by a denser population; nor had its men 
and women changed much, though they, 
too, were somewhat modified, in that there 
was less rusticity among them, more liber- 
ality of thought, and (possibly) a little more 
education. Puritan, at least in rural neigh- 
bourhoods, Massachusetts remained Puritan 
long after I was born. 

There are in Mr. Bryant's autobiography 
and Mr. Godwin's biography a series of pic- 
tures, or sketches, of life in New England, in 
the last lustrum of the eighteenth century 
and the first years of the nineteenth century, 
and as it is a manner of life of which the 
present generation can know nothing, except 
from hearsay, it may be worth while to con- 
sider it a little, since its memory is rapidly 
vanishing, and since its depiction will serve 
as a background against which imagination 
may project the childish figure of the com- 
ing poet. 

The theatre in which the drama of this 
life was performed, and the actors who 
performed in it, were still primitive, for 
nature had not yet been mastered, and the 
usages of the Puritan times survived. Men 
227 



RECOLLECTIONS 

were more concerned about living then than 
they are now, for living then was a more 
serious matter. The life of the body was 
sustained by unremitting toil, and the life 
of the soul by religious ministration. Min- 
isters of the gospel were important person- 
ages, and were conscious of their importance. 
They were moral policemen, whose presence 
on public occasions served to restrain the un- 
ruly. They attended militia-trainings, where 
grog and punch were partaken of freely, and 
town-meetings and political gatherings, where 
they sometimes restrained the rancour of con- 
tending partisans. They visited the district 
schools, which were prepared for their com- 
ing in advance, and to which the children 
went in their Sunday clothes. They listened 
to the recitations of the different classes, 
examined them in the Westminster Cate- 
chism, and delivered addresses the burden 
of which was that learning was better than 
houses and lands, and that parents could 
not be enough honoured for the sacrifices 
they made in sending their children to 
school. 

Education, such as it was, cost money, 
228 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

and money was hard to obtain. Fathers of 
families were tenacious of their rights, one 
of the most undoubted of which was the 
service of their offspring until they reached 
the leo^al aQ-es of manhood and womanhood. 
Another of their rights was embodied in 
a bunch of birchen rods, which was bound 
together by a cord and suspended by a nail 
against the wall in the kitchen, and was 
esteemed as much a part of the necessary 
furniture as the crane in the fireplace, or 
the shovel and tongs. " Spare the rod and 
spoil the child " was the motto ; and the rod 
was not spared. The little folk of a century 
or more ago could not have had a very lively 
time; for, besides the rods that were con- 
stantly in pickle for them, they had to know 
the catechism, and to learn psalms and 
hymns. 

The first book printed in New England 
was a psalm-book, the authors of which 
may have understood Hebrew, though they 
knew but little of their own tongue, and 
nothing of poetry. This curious produc- 
tion, which was reprinted over and over, 
was in demand until it was displaced by 
229 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the sacred canticles of Dr. Watts. These 
were sung by old and young in the later 
colonial days, and through the Revolution, 
in churches, by the firesides of farmhouses, 
and by the camp-fires of armies, and finally, 
when the war was over, were enlarged and 
improved by the famous Connecticut poet 
Joel Barlow, who went from bad to worse 
in poetry until he culminated in " The 
Columbiad." 

The amusements of the young people 
were suggestive of work rather than of play. 
They consisted for the most part of " rais- 
ings," where the inevitable minister was, 
where the bustle of carpentry was carried 
on furiously, and where danger was some- 
times present, now on the beams, which 
nimble feet missed, and now on the ridge- 
pole, where the most daring of the work- 
men stood on their heads, with their heels 
in the air. In autumn there were " husk- 
ings " in the barns, which in the evening 
were lighted up with lanterns, under which, 
seated on piles of dry husks, the men and 
boys of the neighbourhood stripped the 
golden ears of their covering, and, breaking 
230 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

the stem with a sudden jerk, threw them 
in baskets about. Stories were told, jokes 
were cracked, and, when the last ear was 
husked, the company adjourned to the farm- 
house, and were treated to pumpkin-pie 
and cider. 

Attached to most farmhouses were or- 
chards filled with apple-trees, some of which 
were just bearing, while others were in their 
prime, and here in the spring days, when 
the boughs were covered with blossoms and 
the air was murmurous with the songs of 
bees, children played. When October came, 
young and old busied themselves in gather- 
ing the apples that had fallen, or that were 
shaken down upon them by strong arms. 
The best were selected for winter use, and 
stored away in bins in the cellar; the rest 
were carried to the cider-mills, which were 
turned by horses, and gushed all day with 
sweet nectareous juice. The making of 
cider was an important industry then, and 
the drinking of it so excessive that it led 
in time to the formation of temperance 
societies. Later in the season there were 
" apple-parings," which brought together 
231 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the Damons and Pythiases of the village, 
who pared and quartered and cored the 
apples preparatory to their being made into 
apple-sauce. 

In the winter evenings there were singing- 
schools, at which they met again, or such 
of them as '* went to meeting," — and who 
did not then ? — where they were instructed 
in psalmody by rural maestri, who were often 
composers in a small way. Homelier joys 
than these, and a more obscure destiny than 
awaited most who shared them, it would be 
hard to find. Their annals were short and 
simple. 

Into such surroundings, at Cummington, 
Massachusetts, William Cullen Bryant was 
ushered, on November 3, 1794. Cumming- 
ton stands in a broad highland region be- 
tween the valleys of the Connecticut and 
the Housatonic, and is some two thousand 
feet above the sea, the Bryant homestead 
being near the rise. It is cold in winter, — 
cold in summer, for that matter, — so that 
the semicircle of evergreens and the hill 
and wood on the northwest were a welcome 
shelter from the wind. The snows in such 
232 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

places, when they once fall, generally remain 
on the ground till spring. When spring 
comes, the rivers, swollen by the rains and 
snows, break in pieces the ice which has 
been 'gathering all winter, and sweep it along 
with a tumult that can be heard for miles, 
piling it up along the banks. A bleak emi- 
nence north of the homestead looks down 
upon a narrow wooded valley, through which 
flows the Westfield on its way to the Con- 
necticut. 

Farther to the north, and overlooking the 
Westfield, is Deer Hill, and twenty miles 
away rises the blue summit of Graylock. 
The northern outlook from the hill is mag- 
nificent. A little to the left is a rocky 
pasture, which was once used as a burying- 
ground ; and near by is Johnno Brook, a 
little stream in a deep rocky dingle, down 
which it plunges in steep descents, bordered 
by red and white birches, hurrying on its 
noisy journey to the quiet waters of the 
Westfield. 

Such were Cummington and its neighbour- 
hood in the childhood and youth of Mr. 
Bryant. I have indicated them as clearly 
233 



RECOLLECTIONS 

as I could, as well as the character of the 
people at that time, and their ways of think- 
ing and living, for I hold that the mind of 
the young poet was coloured by them. They 
passed into his being, and when he began 
to write they were reproduced from the rich 
storehouse of his memory. He was attracted 
first by natural objects, — the sparkle of the 
spring near the homestead, the pencilled 
shadow of the grasses on its margin, the 
warble of the bluebird in the woods, and the 
glint of the yellow violet as it peeped out 
of the last year's leaves. As his observation 
enlarged, it embraced the landscape, which 
became vital to him. No boy in Cumming- 
ton had so keen an eye as he, nor such 
woodland lore as he gathered in his rambles. 
He was a born naturalist, as much so as 
Audubon, and, without knowing it, was fit- 
ting himself to be the first and greatest 
painter of New England scenery. 

I have not read " The Embargo," Bryant's 
anti-Jefferson satire printed at Boston in 
1808, and I do not care to, the extracts 
therefrom which I have seen convincing me 
that what I understand by the word Poetry 
234 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

is conspicuous by its absence. The first 
true note that Master Cullen struck was 
higher than any ever struck out of party 
contests, and of more permanent significance 
than any yet heard in America. It was not 
caught from the poets whom he read, but 
direct from nature, the fresh, wild, stern, 
impressive mountains, valleys, and woods 
which surrounded his birthplace. 

If I were writing the history of American 
Poetry, I would go over the journals of the 
time, and trace, as I have no doubt I could, 
through the critical comments of these jour- 
nals, the welcome with which " Thanatopsis " 
was greeted. But, as I am not writing the 
history of American Poetry, I content my- 
self with saying that it made an immediate 
and profound impression upon all thoughtful 
readers, who recognised the advent of a new 
and true poet. 

Bryant was recognised at once by his 
brother and sister singers, who testified their 
admiration by imitation, which continued 
for years. This fact is patent in the verse 
of all his contemporaries, old and young, 
and nowhere more patent than in the juvenile 
235 



RECOLLECTIONS 

verse of Longfellow, as readers of " Voices 
of the Night " will readily remember. The 
dawn of American Poetry was ushered into 
the world in " Thanatopsis." 

Acknowledged as a poet from whom 
the greatest things might be expected, 
Mr. Bryant removed to New York in his 
thirty-first year, and, after assisting in two 
or three literary ventures which were not 
successful, he became one of the editors of 
the Evening Post, and a year or two later 
editor-in-chief. 

Materials for a description of the New 
York of the twenties are abundant and 
curious, but I shall not avail myself of them 
further than to say that the city practically 
ended then at Canal Street on the Hudson 
River side, and not far from Houston Street 
on the East River side; that the business 
part of it lay between Bowling Green and 
Chambers Street ; and that with all its 
wealth and enterprise, one must recollect, it 
was little more than a provincial town. It 
possessed one advantage, however, which the 
overgrown metropolis of to-day long since 
sacrificed, and that consisted in the pastoral 
236 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

beauty of its immediate suburbs and the wild 
loveliness of its adjacent neighbourhoods. 

The inhabitants of New York (if I may 
judge from my remembrance of them ten 
years later) had a passion for out-door life 
which they no longer have, and which led 
to long rambles along the river-banks, on 
Long Island, and in New Jersey. Mr. 
Bryant was given to these delightful ram- 
bles, either alone, or with his friends Halleck, 
Sands, and Verplanck, who, like himself, 
were lovers of nature, and who, unlike him- 
self, were lovers of good cheer at country 
taverns and hostelries. 

The editorial profession when Mr. Bryant 
entered it was an honourable one. It was 
conducted by men of principle as well as 
talent, who believed in the truth as well 
as the expediency of the opinions they ad- 
vocated, and who never forgot the ameni- 
ties of life in the heat of writing. Partisan, 
they were not unscrupulous ; and severe, 
they w^ere not savage. Brutality and black- 
guardism are the rank growths of later years 
than those in which Mr. Bryant was installed 
in the editorial chair of the Evening Post. 

2^7 



RECOLLECTIONS 

It was read by all the best people in New 
York, friends and foes alike, — not because 
it was brilliant, though it was not deficient 
in brilliancy, but because it was known to be 
unpurchased and unpurchasable, and could 
be depended on as the exponent of his ma- 
tured judgment. 

The new editor of the Evening Post was 
not the man to spare himself, so far as work 
was concerned : he cheerfully accepted and 
faithfully performed all the drudgery it en- 
tailed upon him, and was soon acknowledged 
as a power in the land. Politics ran high, 
as they always do here, but he rode them 
fearlessly, and in the main triumphantly; 
for during the fifty years of his editorial life 
he witnessed the rise and fall of two great 
parties, battling at times with both, and 
lived to see what was good in both con- 
solidated into something better. 

I honour Mr. Bryant for his laborious life, 
and admire him for the determination which 
kept him a poet through it all. The child 
was father to the man, and the man never 
forgot the child's birthright of song, — the 
divine birthright which revealed him to him- 
238 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

self, which brightened his brooding 3^outh, 
sustained him through his strugghng man- 
hood, and consecrated him in his old age. 
The chambers of his mind were crowded 
with g"uests whom he would not have chosen 
if he had been free to choose, but there was 
one chamber into which they never pene- 
trated, — into which nothing common ever 
penetrated, in that it was the inmost sanc- 
tuary of his soul. 

The poems that he wrote in New York 
and elsewhere were of the same general 
character as. those that he wrote at Cum- 
mington, the only difference between them 
being that the later ones are riper and more 
mature than the earlier ones, larger in inten- 
tion and scope, of broader and higher sig- 
nificance, more thoughtful and meditative, 
more serious and dignified, more purely 
poetical and imaginative, — in a single word, 
of greater distinction. What separates them 
from all other American poems is imagina- 
tion, which was the supreme quality of his 
genius, and which, while it is nowhere ab- 
sent from his verse, is omnipresent in his 
blank verse, which is the best that has been 
239 



RECOLLECTIONS 

written by any modern poet whatever, — 
the most sustained, the most impressive, 
the most unforgetable. No one can read 
" Thanatopsis," "The Prairies," "The An- 
tiquity of Freedom," and " The Flood of 
Years " without feeling that Mr. Bryant was 
a great poet. 

I was acquainted with Mr. Bryant during 
the last twenty years of his life, but whether 
I really knew him is not for me to say; for 
he was never demonstrative, and, friendly 
always, was reserved, as he had a right to be. 
He knew that I admired his poetry and had 
an intellectual reverence for his character, 
and I think he liked me for this reverence 
and this admiration. He saw what I wrote 
about him, and what I wrote about the first 
volume of his translation of the " Iliad " 
gratified him so much that he thanked me 
for my hasty notice in a gracious letter. 

I have been told, though I do not know 
it of my own knowledge, that he thought 
well of my verse, and of my careful use 
of our mother-tongue, of which he was 
so great a master. I paid my respects to 
240 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

him when his seventieth birthday was cele- 
brated by the Century Club, of which we 
were both members, and I was anxious to 
do him honour. I was a paid contributor 
to his paper in war-times, though I do not 
think he was aware of that trifling fact, and 
at a later period I might have been one of 
its editors, had I not declined, for reasons 
that were satisfactory to him as well as to 
myself. That he was ever ready to serve 
me I know, and I recall here a note which 
he wrote in my behalf while I was wasting 
my best days in the New York Custom- 
House, and in which he certified to my 
business capacity, and requested my con- 
tinuance in office, in case I was likely to 
be removed. I wish I had kept this letter, 
which was a handsome one, and which, after 
all, was of no service to me, since I was 
soon subjected to the customary political 
decapitation. 

I recall another instance of his kindness, 
which must have cost a man of his years 
considerable trouble. It was connected with 
a poem which I had been asked to deliver 
before the Grand Army of the Republic, at 
i6 241 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Springfield, Massachusetts, in May, 1878, 
and which I wrote to the best of my ability. 
When it was finished I had it set up in type, 
in order to see how it looked in print, and, 
knowing that Mr. Bryant had written a poem 
of the same nature (to compare great things 
with small) which he read at Cambridge 
fifty-seven years before, I asked him if he 
would criticise it for me in proof, as severely 
as if we were not friends. He assented, and 
I sent him the proof, which he criticised in 
the spirit that I desired, though rather more 
kindly, I fear, than it deserved. 

Two or three days elapsed before I met 
him again, and when we had exchanged 
greetings he handed me a letter containing 
his criticisms. I wanted to talk with him, 
and would have done so but for the presence 
of one of our impecunious poets, who had 
evidently called upon him in his editorial 
room, and who had accompanied him into 
the business office of the Evenino- Post. I 
knew that a money transaction was about 
to take place, and not wishing, for the honour 
of the guild, to witness it, I left Mr. Bryant 
and his brother poet to themselves, noting as 
242 



THE AUTHOR OF THANATOPSIS 

I did so that the hand of Mr. Bryant was in 
the act of sHpping into his pocket. I folded 
up his letter, which was the last that he 
wrote, went away, and never saw him more, 
for in a week or ten days he was dead ! 



243 



XVII 
TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

DURING Bayard Taylor's absence 
abroad I gave a hostage to fortune 
in the person of a wife, as I have 
already related, and on his return to America 
in 1853, he found two friends where he had 
left but one. We no longer met at night 
in his loft}'- attic in Murray Street (if it was 
Murray Street), but in my cosey rooms in 
Third Street, where we had oysters when 
we wanted them, besides whatever beverage 
was in the house. 

He came to us one night in high glee, 
with a flask of wine which he had obtained 
on board of a Greek vessel. He said that 
Homer had drank of it, and when it was 
opened, and we had tasted it, I wondered at 
the taste, not to say the courage, of Homer, 
for *' the Homeric beverage," as he named it, 
was execrable. He stood up for it as long 
as he could, and tried to persuade himself 
244 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

that he Hked it, but we laughed him out of 
his supposed liking, and made him confess 
that it was horrid stuff. 

Bayard Taylor had his little enthusiasms, 
which he insisted on my sharing with him, 
though I fought against them strenuously. 
I tried once to smoke a nargileh in his 
room, but could not do it; neither could he, 
when he set about it seriously, so I had the 
laugh against him. He brought me all the 
poems that he had written while abroad, 
and I was delighted at their excellence. If 
I had not been aware of the ease with which 
he wrote, I should have been surprised at 
the rapidity with which these poems suc- 
ceeded each other. 

He had copied them out, in the order in 
which they were composed, in a blank-book, 
which he presented to me after they were 
fairly written out for the press, — " to keep 
when he was dead." (" Ah, woful when ! "). 
They are before me now, in his perfect 
manuscript, and as I turn the leaves slowly 
the winter nights in which I first read them 
return, and the stretch of time which has 
intervened rolls lightly away. 
245 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I thought, and I think so still, when I 
read these spirited and picturesque poems, 
that Bayard Taylor had captured the poetic 
secret of the East as no English-writing poet 
but Byron had; and I rejoiced heartily that 
they would add fresh laurels to his wreath. 
He knew the East as no one can possibly 
know it from books, or Moore would have 
reflected it with greater fidelity in " Lalla 
Rookh." " I am quite Turkified in my 
habits," Bayard Taylor wrote me from Con- 
stantinople (July 21, 1852), "sitting cross- 
legged, smoking pipes, swearing by Allah, 
and wearing a big white turban. In Asia 
Minor I frequently went into mosques, and 
was looked upon as a good Mohammedan." 
That he was not so Turkified as he would 
have had me suppose was evident to me 
while I read the " Winter Solstice," the 
" Requiem in the South," and " The Mys- 
tery," three touching and beautiful poems, 
which no Eastern poet could have imagined, 
much less written, and no Western poet, 
unless his soul had been touched to fine 
tones by a great loss and a mournful re- 
membrance. 

246 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

I especially admired the " Bedouin Song," 
which is worthy of a place beside Shelley's 
" Lines to an Indian Air," which it some- 
what recalls, " Amran's Wooing," " The Birth 
of the Prophet," " Hassan to his Mare," and 
" Tyre," which refuses to be forgotten : 

" The wild and windy morning is lit with lurid fire ; 
The thundering surf of ocean beats on the rocks of 

Tyre,— 
Beats on the fallen columns, and round the headland roars, 
And hurls its foamy volume along the hollow shores, 
And calls with hungry clamor, and speaks its long desire, 
* Where are the ships of Tarshish, the mighty ships of 

Tyre?'" 

One charm which this volume possessed, 
and which is not common in modern collec- 
tions of verse, was the " Epistle from Mount 
Tmolus " with which it opened, and which 
was addressed to myself. It was a beauti- 
ful compliment, of which any one might 
have been proud. 

I recall many nights which Bayard Taylor 
passed in our rooms, and especially one 
when he made me proud and happy by 
reading me this poem about our poetic 
friendship, written in Greece, and inspired, 
I assured him, by a warmer and richer 
247 



RECOLLECTIONS 

draught than the Homeric beverage ! Great 
was our merriment; for if we did not always 
sink the ship, we kept it for our own amuse- 
ment solely. Fitz James O'Brien — whose 
acquaintance we had made while Taylor 
was abroad — was a frequent guest, and an 
eager partaker of our merriment, which 
somehow resolved itself into the writing of 
burlesque poems. 

We sat around a table, and whenever the 
whim seized us, which was often enough, 
we each wrote down themes on little pieces 
of paper, and putting them into a hat or a 
box we drew out one at random, and then 
scribbled away for dear life. We put no re- 
striction upon ourselves : we could be grave, 
or gay, or idiotic even ; but we must be 
rapid, for half the fun was in noting who 
first sang out " Finished ! " It was a neck- 
and-neck race between Bayard Taylor and 
Fitz James O'Brien, who divided the honours 
pretty equally, and whose verses, I am com- 
pelled to admit, were generally better than 
my own. Bayard Taylor was very dexter- 
ous in seizing the salient points of the poets 
we girded at, and was as happy as a child 

248 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

when his burlesques were successful. He 
reminded me, I told him once, of Katerfelto, 

" with his hair on end 
At his own wonders." 

He blushed, laughed, and admitted that his 
cleverness pleased him, and he was glad that 
it pleased us, also. 

" It is good sport," he remarked ; " but 
not poetry, — that is a very different and 
very serious matter." I mention these tri- 
fling intellectual duels, because they were a 
continual source of amusement among our 
common friends. 

It was through Taylor that I met Washing- 
ton Irving and Thackeray, and I might have 
met other eminent authors, but for a certain 
wayward indifference which was native to me, 
and which I have never ceased to lament. 

In the summer of 1856, Bayard Taylor 
departed for Europe the second time, and 
when he returned — in the autumn of 1858 
— it was with a German wife and a German- 
American daughter clothed after the man- 
ner of babies in the Fatherland. After a 
249 



RECOLLECTIONS 

short visit to his beloved Kennett, he con- 
cluded to reside in the same house with me 
and mine in Brooklyn, and we spent our 
first Christmas under the same roof. From 
that time we never failed to celebrate the 
day together, when he was in town, either 
at his house or mine. 

He brought from the Old World the re- 
ceipt of a wonderful punch, which was con- 
cocted of champagne and claret, pounded 
ice and oranges or pineapples, and which 
was christened "cardinal punch." The bowl 
of it which graced our table that first Christ- 
mas Eve quickened the memory of the 
happy poet, who referred to a lyric of Ken- 
yon's on " Champagne Rose," which he ad- 
mired greatly, and could repeat by heart. 

" Lily on liquid roses floating," he began, 
and went through the poem without missing 
a word of it. We argued that the third 
stanza was the best, though we disclaimed 
the imputation in the first two Hues : — 

** And true it is they cross in pain 

Who sober cross the Stygian ferry ; 
But only make our Styx champagne, 
And we shall cross right merry, 
Floating away on wine ! " 
250 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

I told him I thought I could beat that, 
and I read him a song in praise of claret, 
written over two hundred years before, by 
Alexander Brome, the lawyer. The closing 
lines, I remarked, were prophetic of what 
was before us : 

" Since we 're to pass through this Red Sea, 
Our noses shall our pilots be, 
And every soul a swimmer." 

" Crown the bowl with flowers of soul," 
quoted the merry bard as he handed me a 
goblet of punch. 

We saw less of Bayard Taylor during 
the winter than we had hojoed, for he was 
away from home most of the time, lecturing. 
When spring came he determined to remove 
to New^ York. 

We must live together, he said; as he 
was more prosperous than I, he would pay 
the rent of the house. It would be so jolly 
to have a library in which we could write! 
And how we would write ! They would 
soon cease to call us " younger poets," and 
we should take our proper places among 
the Old Masters. Young, quotha.? Why, 
we were thirty-four! 

251 



RECOLLECTIONS 

It was impossible to resist his enthusiasm, 
or to refuse his generosity. I could do 
neither, so we set up our two households in 
one house in Thirteenth Street. It was a 
risky thing to do, perhaps, for the best of 
friends can see too much of each other ; but 
we managed to do it, nevertheless, and with- 
out adding a fresh chapter to the " Quarrels 
of Authors." 

We were scarcely settled in our new quar- 
ters before the Taylors were in Kennett 
again, directing the building of a country- 
seat. Bayard Taylor was his own architect, 
and apparently his own superintendent, over- 
looking brick-makers, stone-cutters, haulers, 
et id 07nne genus diadolorum. It was a Napo- 
leonic business for a poet. 

" To-day we placed the great corner-stone 
of the tower, with all due ceremony," he 
wrote on June 7th. " Under it is a box of 
zinc, containing a copy of ' Views Afoot ; ' 
an original poem by me, to be read ^vo, 
hundred years hence by somebody who 
never heard of me ; some coins ; a poem by 
R. H. S. in his own MS. ; and various small 
things. All of us — even Lily — contrib- 
252 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

uted a trowelful of mortar. I broke the neck 
of a bottle on the stone, and poured oblation 
to all good Lares and Penates, and then 
gave the workmen cakes and ale." 

If we had not lived so happily together, 
in town and country, during the next two 
years, I should doubtless remember the little 
events of our common life more clearly than 
I do. We were all young enough to be 
merry, and we passed our leisure as Cowper 
and Thurlow passed theirs when studying 
law, — in giggling and making giggle. We 
made the most of what we possessed, and 
were never so happy as when we had our 
friends about us. Our circle of acquaint- 
ance was greatly enlarged, and our rooms 
were often crowded at night with major and 
minor celebrities, — young poets and older 
painters, philosophers who were too imma- 
ture to be considered either young or old, 
editors and journalists, and other pilgrims to 
what Taylor facetiously called the " Shrine 
of Genius." 

While living with Taylor I was temerari- 
ous enough to undertake a popular life of 
his friend Humboldt. I succeeded after 
253 



RECOLLECTIONS 

a fashion, and, helped by an introduction 
which he contributed, the venture was suc- 
cessful. Here also, but a year later, I made 
a collection of amatory verse from the best 
English and American poets, and by dint 
of Its Illustrations this too was successful, 
or would have been but for the Impending 
shadow of our great Civil War, which was 
mustering its forces in every direction. 

Republican to his heart's core, Bayard 
could not understand how and why I hap- 
pened to be a Democrat. That I was honest, 
and not captious, In my political opinions, he 
probably believed, and, as I never allow my- 
self to dispute about such trifles as popular 
leaders and unpopular generals, we got on 
very well together. We wrote war-poems, 
which were sufflclently vehement, and which 
I do not care to remember now: they are 
best forgotten. The evil days through which 
we passed cost me some bitter words, and 
cost Taylor the loss of his youngest brother, 
who fell at the head of his regiment at 
Gettysburg. 

We always made much of Christmas, which 
we kept as the poet's wife had been accus- 
254 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

tomed to see it kept in her German father- 
land. We had a Christmas-tree, which was 
installed in state in the back parlour the day 
before Christmas, and was decorated with 
little glass globes, tiny candles, flags, ribbons, 
and what not, as full as it could hold. The 
ladies of the household were the only ones 
who had access to it, and they arranged our 
Christmas presents on its branches, and on 
tables and stands around it. The folding 
doors were closed, and we were not permitted 
to enter the room until the candles were 
lighted, and they were ready for us. We 
were as eager as children in the interim, 
laughing in our sleeves at the gifts we were 
to make, and puzzling our heads over the 
gifts we were to receive. We rode each 
other's hobbies, exhausting our ingenuity in 
selecting oddities to provoke laughter and 
promote good fellowship. We invited a 
young poet to spend a Christmas Eve with 
us, and showered upon him all sorts of mu- 
sical instruments: drums, trumpets, fiddles, 
fifes, penny whistles, jew's-harps, — every- 
thing, in short, that would indicate his de- 
votion to the Muse. We made more of our 
255 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Christmas Eves than of all other nio^hts in 
the year. 

Bayard Taylor finished his country house, 
" Cedarcroft," in the summer of i860, and 
gave his friends and neighbours a house- 
warming such as was never before known 
in Pennsylvania. Our families were to- 
gether, as in New York, and we, their lords 
and masters, resolved to surprise them, and 
ourselves, by writing a play. We went into 
a quiet room, and sketched out a trifle with 
which we hoped to amuse the expected vis- 
itors. There was but one room in which 
it could be acted, and as scenery was not 
practicable we managed to have the action 
take place in the parlour of a hotel which 
we named the " Effervescing House," and 
located at Saratoga. 

We studied our company, and settled 
upon the number we thought we could de- 
pend upon, and upon the parts which would 
be likely to suffer least at their hands ; then 
we set to work to write as rapidly as our 
pens would travel over the paper, and when 
our company was letter perfect in the text, 
and in their stage directions, we went to an 
256 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

old disused printing-office in Kennett, and 
set up the bill of the performance, with flam- 
ing head-lines : — 

CEDARCROFT THEATRE! 

Great Ati'raction! 

Saturday, August i8, i860, 

Will be presented for the first time a 

New Comedy 

In one act, entitled, 

LOVE AT A HOTEL! 

By the world-renowned dramatic authors, Mr. B. 

T. Cedarcroft and Mr. R. H. S. Customhouse. 

This was followed by the dramatis per- 
sonce: Mr. Charles Augustus Montmorency, 
a fast young gentleman, without any visible 
means of support; Captain Morton Price, 
U. S. A.; Mr. A. Binks, proprietor of the 
" Effervescing House ; " Barney O'Brien, 
porter; Miss Araminta Delaporte, a senti- 
mental old maid of French descent, with a 
nervous dread of boys, mice, etc. ; Miss Julia 
Grindle, her niece ; and Mehitable Jones, of 
Squam Neck, chambermaid. 

The " comedy " was a great success, and 
deserved to be (before a country audience), 
for there was not an original scene, situation, 
17 25; 



RECOLLECTIONS 

thought, or word in it. It had been played 
so many times before, in one form or an- 
other, that it could not well have failed now ; 
and it did not fail. We amused our audi- 
ence in the acting, as we had amused our- 
selves in the writing, and we parted on the 
best of terms. 

Eight years later Taylor gave another 
and better entertainment at Cedarcroft, in 
the shape of a masque which was written to 
commemorate the golden wedding of his 
parents. It was cast in verse, was fairly 
represented by his family and friends, and 
was followed by the recitation of a poem 
by Mr. Boker and of a copy of verses by 
myself. 

I have a lively remembrance of the sum- 
mer days and nights which were spent by 
me and mine at Cedarcroft. Taylor and I 
wrote together as in the old days at New 
York, and when the pressing demands for 
copy were supplied, we strolled under the 
shadows of the cedars on his lawn. I have 
visions of his guests at this time, but whether 
we really saw them, or heard of their being 
present, I am not sure, for among them there 

258 



TAYLOR'S RETURN TO HIS FRIENDS 

is the shape, or shadow, of my first boy, who 
was then on the threshold of the other world, 
and whose joyous life and early death are 
celebrated by Taylor in his touching poem 
of Euphorion. 

When I last saw Taylor after these long 
years of friendship, it was in my own house. 
He had just been confirmed as our minister 
to Berlin, and his admirers were intent on 
giving him a hearty send-off. They break- 
fasted him, dined him, supped him. He 
was not looking as well as before his con- 
firmation, for his labours on the Tribune, to 
which he had returned, told upon him. Of 
those who were present at the reception 
which I gave our new minister on the eve 
of his departure for Germany, and which 
was not a merry one, I remember only 
Bryant and Taylor. I saw Bryant but once 
more, and Taylor never again. For before 
the year was over, the two poets had passed 
away. 

If I were called upon to single out of my 

thirty years' recollections of Bayard Taylor 

the one above all others by which I should 

prefer to remember him, it would be the 

259 



RECOLLECTIONS 

night on which we celebrated his fortieth 
birthday (January ii, 1865). His friends 
prepared for it beforehand, each thinking 
what would be most absurdly appropriate 
(or inappropriate) to present him, and all 
keeping their own counsel, ransacking in- 
vention for preposterous mementos. It fell 
to my lot to act as the scribe, and as the 
Century Club had lately printed a volumi- 
nous account of its celebration of the seven- 
tieth birthday of Mr. Bryant, I resolved to 
burlesque that account. I imagined the 
decoration of Bayard Taylor's chambers, the 
gathering of his friends, and wrote letters of 
regret from those who could not be present, 
but who somehow happened to be present 
in spite of their letters. The reading of 
these missives and sundry copies of verse, 
and the bestowal of our mementos, pro- 
voked more fun than had ever before, or has 
ever since, distinguished our Taylor nights. 
It was not so much that they were comical 
in themselves (though they were) as that we 
were willing to fool and to be fooled to the 
top of our bent. The table was in a roar 
till long after midnight. 
260 



XVIII 

"THIS LIKABLE YOUNG POET" 

TO go back a little, there appeared 
in the columns of the New York 
Tribune, in 1859, two poems which 
attracted a great deal of attention. The 
subjects were as different from each other 
as possible, and no one would have thought 
that the verse in which they were embodied 
could have come from the same hand. I 
will tell you about them in a few words. 

There w^as at the time, in New York, a 
Cuban planter, who was said to be very rich, 
and who was engaged to a young lady in 
that city. He had purchased for her, as a 
bridal present, a number of most expensive 
jewels, which the newspapers of the day de- 
scribed extensively, not forgetting, of course, 
to mention their cost in dollars and cents. 
If I remember rightly, they also described 
the young lady's bridal outfit, silks, laces, 
261 



RECOLLECTIONS 

and so on, and the sums which they, too, 
cost. Briefly, then, the newspapers made a 
pubhc fuss over what should have been a 
private matter. 

It seemed to a young gentleman who was 
working in a subordinate position on the 
Tribune that this was a fit subject for a 
piece of satirical verse, and he accordingly 
wrote one which he entitled " The Diamond 
Wedding." It made a great sensation and 
a great row ; for the father of the young 
lady sent a challenge to the poor poet. The 
challenge was accepted, but soon withdrawn 
by the challenger, who decided to resort to 
the courts for satisfaction. Meantime " The 
Diamond Wedding" proved that a new 
poet had come, and one who could, if he 
chose, snatch the laurels from the brows of 
all the humorous poets of America. 

The other poem to which I have referred 
displayed a grim kind of humour which was 
new in American poetry. It w^as about a 
stern old man who made this year a memor- 
able one in the history of the United States, 
by boldly marching with a few men into 
Virginia, and capturing Harper's Ferry. 
262 



"THIS LIKABLE YOUNG POET" 

" How Old Brown took Harper's Ferry " 
made a great sensation, and ought to have 
made it, for there was no American poet 
who might not have been proud to have 
written" it. 

My good friend Bayard Taylor and I were 
living together in the same house when these 
poems appeared, and I remember his com- 
ing home one afternoon and teUing me that 
he had that day, or the day before, met their 
author in the editorial rooms of the Tribune, 
and had had a talk with him, and that he 
liked him very much. 

A few evenings afterward this likable 
young poet came to see me, and I was 
charmed with him. He had read much, I 
discovered ; he talked well ; and he was 
what most poets are not — modest. 

Such was my first meeting with Edmund 
Clarence Stedman. I asked him to show 
me his poems, printed and unprinted, for 
he told me that he had enough to make a 
small volume ; and he did so. I read them 
with great care ; I corrected them where I 
thought they needed it, and I tried to get 
a publisher for him. I think that my opin- 

2^1 



RECOLLECTIONS 

ion was not without weight with the gentle- 
man who became his publisher, — the elder 
Mr. Charles Scribner. " Poems, Lyrical and 
Idyllic," which was issued in the spring of 
i860, was and is the best first book that I 
ever read. 

The two poems that opened it showed 
that the writer had read the greatest poet 
of our time, — Alfred Tennyson ; but they 
also showed that his own originality had 
not been overpowered by his admiration 
for this master. " Penelope," the second 
poem, was and is worthy to be read with 
Tennyson's noble poem of " Ulysses." The 
hand of a fine Greek scholar is visible in 
every line. That he was familiar with the 
scenery of New England, and the early life 
of its people, was evident in " The Freshet," 
which is still the best example of Ameri- 
can idyllic poetry. One feels in reading it 
that Stedman knew what he was writing 
about. 

He is a born New Englander, a native of 

the land of wooden nutmegs, — Connecticut. 

He comes of a good family, and a poetic 

family. He may be said, indeed, to have in- 

264 



''THIS LIKABLE YOUNG POET" 

herited poetry from his mother, who figured 
in Dr. Griswold's " Female Poets," and later 
as the author of a tragedy called " Bianco 
Capello." 

At -the early age of sixteen Stedman was 
sent to Yale College, where he was among 
the foremost in English composition and 
Greek. He wrote an English poem for a 
periodical which was published by the stu- 
dents, and a very clever poem it was consid- 
ered. The discipline of Yale was stricter 
than suited the mercurial temperament of 
the young poet; he fell under the censure 
of the college authorities, and quitted college 
without taking a degree. His error, what- 
ever it was, could not have been a very 
grave one, for the University afterward en- 
rolled him among the alumni for 1853, with 
the degree of Master of Arts. 

When he was nineteen he was managing 
a newspaper at Norwich. In the following 
year he married Miss Laura Woodworth of 
that beautiful town, and became the owner 
of the Wins ted Herald, which soon rose to 
be one of the most important of the rural 
papers in the State. 

265 



RECOLLECTIONS 

Of the life of Stedman during the next 
five or six years I know nothing, except that 
the latter part of it was spent in New York. 
Whether it was ambition which sent him 
there, or the desire of bettering his fortune, 
he has never told me ; but I imagine it was 
both. 

I have no doubt that he had to struggle 
to obtain a foothold in literature, — every 
unknown man of letters has to struggle 
in a great city, — but he obtained it, for 
when I first knew him he was writing on the 
Tribune, as I have already said. 

He was living among the Bohemians, five- 
score or otherwise, when I first visited him, 
and with him were his wife and his children, 
— two boys. 

Speaking of Bohemians reminds me of 
Pfaff' s, which has been so much talked of as 
a centre of literary and artistic Bohemian- 
ism ; I never went inside the place. Once I 
walked down the steps and stood at the 
door. I saw Walt Whitman and others in- 
side, but through diffidence or some other 
feeling, I did not enter. 

Stedman remained on the Tribune until 
266 



''THIS LIKABLE YOUNG POET" 

the World was started, when he transferred 
his talent to that journal. This was in the 
fall or winter of i860. He was one of the 
editors of the World when Fort Sumter 
was fired upon, and when the news of the 
firing was sent over the wires he wrote a 
poem upon it, which was one of the first, if 
not the very first, poem of any note which 
the impending war awoke. When the war 
broke out he went to Washington as the 
army correspondent of the World, and a 
very able one he proved himself. I for- 
get whether his letters excelled those of 
other correspondents for accuracy, but they 
certainly excelled them in spirit. 

He was at the first battle of Bull Run, 
where the North was routed, as we all re- 
member. Other correspondents sent letters 
to their papers about it, but none came 
from him. 

" Where is he 1 " his friends asked ; but 
nobody knew. 

Two, or perhaps three, days passed before 

he returned to New York. The next day 

there appeared in the World a long and 

graphic letter about the lost battle which 

267 



RECOLLECTIONS 

he had witnessed, — a letter which was the 
town's talk for days. Altogether it was the 
best single letter written during the whole 
war. 

Toward the close of the war Stedman 
resigned his position on the World, and 
entered the office of Attorney-General Bates 
at Washington. In January, 1864, he re- 
turned to New York with his family, and 
published his second collection of verse, 
" Alice of Monmouth," which may be de- 
scribed as a little poetical novel. The open- 
ing scenes are laid in Monmouth County, 
New Jersey ; the middle and last ones in the 
battlefields and hospitals of Virginia. 

There is a notion which many people 
entertain without thinking, that a man can- 
not be at one and the same time a poet 
and a man of business. It is a mistake. 
Fitz-Greene Halleck was for miany years a 
competent clerk of John Jacob Astor, as I 
have said ; Charles Sprague was for forty- 
five years teller and cashier in a Boston 
bank ; Samuel Rogers, the English poet, 
was all his life a banker, and a very success- 
ful one, too. To these names must be 
268 



''THIS LIKABLE YOUNG POET" 

added that of Stedman, who put himself at 
the head of a firm of stock-brokers, which 
he started shortly after his return to New 
York/ 

I have mentioned one mistaken notion 
that many people entertain, namely, that a 
man cannot be a poet and a man of busi- 
ness ; but I have not mentioned another, 
namely, that a poet cannot be a critic. If 
poets are not the best critics of poetry, 
musicians are not the best critics of music, 
architects of architecture, and painters of 
painting. The idea is absurd ! 

Stedman's " Victorian Poets " — published 
in 1875 — is the most important contribu- 
tion ever made by an American writer to 
the critical literature of the English poets. 

1 If Mr. Stoddard's health had permitted he would 
doubtless have developed to adequate proportions these 
recollections of one who, as the years went on, was more 
and more closely bound to him by the ties of a most 
intimate friendship. — R. H. 



269 



XIX 

SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

I HAVE known, more or less, most 
American poets who were worth know- 
ing, beginning in my early years with 
youngsters of my own age, — Taylor, Boker, 
Read, Stedman, — and continuing, as the 
years went on, with Bryant, Lowell, and 
Longfellow; and among my scanty pleasures 
of memory the most precious in my eyes are 
those connected with the hours when the 
orbit of my life intersected theirs in a happy 
conjunction. I recall as if it were yesterday 
the day when I first met Taylor, and the 
night when, in Taylor's room, I first met 
Boker, and other nights and days when I 
first met Read and Stedman ; but I am not 
so sure of the seasons when I first met the 
masters, whom I approached with more rev- 
erence and an apprehension that was more 
than trepidation. 

270 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

I never made a poetical pilgrimage in my 
life, and, judging from what I have heard 
from those who have made real pilgrimages, 
I never desired to. My meetings with my 
betters' were always unpremeditated and 
unexpected ones, — I may say occasionally 
unwilling ones, for, knowing my deficiencies, 
I was fearful of intruding. That I need not 
have been, I learned after a time, for the 
older and greater the poet the kinder and 
more considerate I found him. 

I had two or three good friends in Boston 
in the old far-away days when I began to 
write verse, — the elder Ticknor, Whipple, 
Fields, — and I scarcely ever made a sum- 
mer visit to that delightful little city (I speak 
of the Boston of the late forties, remember) 
without being asked to join in their outings 
to Concord, or to Cambridge, or to Nahant. 
I was in Boston on one of these fairy visits 
about this time, and, happening to drop in 
at the Old Corner Bookstore, which was a 
noted landmark then, I found Fields and 
Whipple behind a green baize curtain fac- 
ing a window on School Street (but was it 
School Street ?) and was invited to go with 
271 



RECOLLECTIONS 

them to Nahant to see Longfellow. Grati- 
fied, as I should have been, but timid, as 
became one whose spurs were still to win, I 
pleaded an imaginary engagement, but was 
overruled : so we strolled to the station, and 
took the cars for Nahant. 

Where Nahant was I had, and have, no 
idea, except that it was on the seashore, and 
that the house which the poet and his family 
occupied was on high ground, near the crest 
of a bluff, I should say, facing the waves and 
a long line of breakers. The outlook sea- 
ward was fine, and, what with the roar of 
the surf, and the cool fresh wind that blew 
shoreward, it was pleasant to be there. 
Longfellow was very courteous, frank, and 
friendly in his manner and conversation, 
and, as we walked together along the 
springy turf on the edge of the bluff, he let 
me talk about poetry and question him, 
Fields and Whipple getting behind us to 
give me an opportunity to do so unchecked. 

" Mr. Longfellow," I said, " do you remem- 
ber some lines in one of Mr. Bryant's early 
poems in which he compares a butterfly to a 
flower floating in the air ? " He did not 
272 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

remember them, so I quoted from " After a 
Tempest : " 

" And from beneath the leaves that kept them dry 
Flew many a glittering insect here and there, 
And darted up and down the butterfly 
That seemed a living blossom of the air." 

" He was struck by them," Fields told me, 
at a later period, " and has booked them for 
use." 

Our walk over, we sauntered back to the 
house. I was introduced to Mrs. Longfel- 
low. We sat down to dinner, and a general 
chat circulated around the table. Fields and 
Whipple discussing new books with the 
poet and social events with his wife, and 
I listening quietly, as was proper. They 
talked, among other things, about fantastic 
and foolish books, for which Longfellow had 
the fondness of a collector, and he quoted 
from one which he had recently procured, 
and in which the hero, whom we may sup- 
pose to have been a jailbird, bolted the door 
— and bolted himself. 

It reminded me, I said, of a passage I 
once read of an irate rustic, who, failing at 
a ball to obtain the hand of the lady with 
i8 273 



RECOLLECTIONS 

whom he wished to dance, — a privilege that 
was granted to a rival, — observed, " The two 
made a set, and I wanted to make a set-to." 
It was not a brilliant observation, but it was 
received with smiles as a maiden attempt at 
wit. 

Whether the reputation of Longfellow 
remains at the high-water mark to which it 
rose during the early part of his life I have 
no means of knowing, for once a poet is 
dead and gone, those who were loudest in 
his praise in his lifetime begin to hark back 
and to question the faith that was in them, 
and his right to exercise the spell to which 
they submitted. If the supremacy of Byron 
was disputed, as we know it was, before he 
died, the popular estimation of Longfellow 
may well have changed in the years that 
have elapsed since his death. 

To read him, as I fancy most of the 
younger generation of his countrymen do, 
by the light of to-day alone, is to read the 
letter and not the spirit of his verse, which 
belongs to an earlier period than this. To 
measure him by the same standards as 
Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, is to 
274 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

measure him by standards which did not 
exist when he started on his poetic career, 
which was twelve or thirteen years before 
Swinburne was born, and when Browning 
and Tennyson were thumbing their school- 
books. He should be read by the glim- 
mering twilight of American literature in 
the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth 
century, when Bryant was the only poet 
and Irving the only prose writer who had 
attained distinction among us. 

I met Longfellow two or three times after 
my visit to Nahant ; twice, I think, at the 
Old Corner Bookstore, and once in his own 
home at Cambridge, where, with several 
elderly men of letters, I dined with him. 
Of these meetings I have no remembrance 
that will bear transference to paper, except 
that they were very pleasant and that I was 
on better terms with myself than before they 
occurred. It is not so much what an old man 
says to a young man that encourages him, 
as what the old man himself is to the young 
man. Words are one thing, manner is an- 
other, and the manner of Longfellow was the 
perfection of courtesy, kindness, and sincerity. 
275 



RECOLLECTIONS 

I have been looking over Longfellow's 
letters to me, and deploring the folly which 
led me to sacrifice so many to the importu- 
nities of the Autograph Fiend, who is prob- 
ably a descendant of one of the daughters 
of the horse-leech mentioned in Scripture. 
The earliest of the few that have escaped 
him is dated November 14,. 1871, and refers 
to a young Englishman, or Irishman, or 
Irish-Englishman, whom Longfellow com- 
mended to my consideration. He had not 
the pleasure of his personal acquaintance, 
he wrote, but the young man had brought 
him a letter of introduction from Lady 
Dalling and Bulwer, and Longfellow was 
anxious to forward his plans. The young 
man wished to write for the periodicals, and 
Longfellow asked from me a kindly hearing 
for him. I was editing a periodical at the 
time, and I gave him a kindly hearing. He 
was not a prepossessing person, though I 
tried to think he was, for I saw by his dress 
that he was poor, and there was an air of 
humility about him that appealed to my 
sympathy. He is a stranger in a strange 
land, I reasoned, and he feels his forlorn 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

condition here, as I should if I were in 
London under similar circumstances. 

I asked him what he had written, and he 
produced a packet of cuttings from English 
magazines, some in verse, which I saw at a 
glance was fairish, and some in prose, which 
I was about to read when I saw they were 
portions of Mrs. Gaskell's " Cranford." My 
wife, who was sitting by, called attention to 
the fact. He coloured, and said his brother, 
who had sent the packet to him, must have 
made it up hurriedly and mixed with his 
work the work of others : he ought to have 
looked it over carefully himself and selected 
his own writings from the rest. We let his 
explanation pass for what it was worth, and 
he soon departed, with a promise on his 
part to write me a story at once. 

After a few days he produced a story, 
which I read and accepted. It was called 
"The Blue Boy," and when I handed him 
what he called the honorarium he told me 
that the idea of it came to him the night 
before, on seeing his landlady's little boy 
clad in a suit of blue clothes. I did not 
quite see how the story could grow out of 



RECOLLECTIONS 

that circumstance, but, as I was not a writer 
of stories, I concluded not to show my igno- 
rance. He called on me again a few nights 
later, and managed, when he departed, to 
leave a fine new overcoat in my room, where 
it remained a week or more. I surmised, 
afterwards, that he had conveyed it from the 
hall-way of some house where he had called, 
and made me his receiver for the time being. 
My surmise may have wronged him, but I 
hardly think so, for before long I found the 
story I had purchased from him in an old 
volume of LittelFs Living Age, 

If I had been a severe moralist I would 
have exposed him to Longfellow, but know- 
ing that the exposure would pain Longfellow 
deeply and seriously injure his protege, I had 
not the heart to do so. He might safely be 
trusted to injure himself without my aid; 
and he did, for before many months were 
over he was detected mutilating books at the 
Astor Library. He was mercifully let off, and 
returned to England, where, in the course of 
time, his talent for fiction bourgeoned into 
an historical romance. 

In the next letter that I have retained, 
278 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

Longfellow refers to some suggestions that 
I made regarding " Poems of Places," which 
he was then editing, and other things which 
I must have added thereto in the note that I 
wrote to him : 

" Camb., Jan. 8, 1878. 

*' Dear Mr. Stoddard, — Please accept my 
thanks for your kind letter, for the poems you 
send me, and those you refer to in Grisvvold. 

'' I have not his ' Female Poets ' at hand, but 
shall lose no time in getting a copy, and examin- 
ing the poems you mention. 

'' Your tribute to Lincoln is beautiful and very 
just. I will keep it carefully out of sight till it 
appears in the magazine. 

*' As to your estimate of Mrs. Stoddard's literary 
abilities, I do not wonder at it. You do not rate 
them a bit too highly; and if her writings have 
not found that swift recognition which they merit, 
I hope it will not discourage her. Often the best 
things win their way slowly, but they are pretty 
sure of being found out sooner or later. 

" Some of your volumes I have. The rest I 
shall find in the libraries here or in Boston. I 
thank you for pointing out the pieces that will be 
of use to me. I have frequently been obliged to 
omit poems of merit because I could not ascertain 
their localities. 

279 



RECOLLECTIONS 

** I was very glad to renew my acquaintance 
with you at the pleasant Atlantic dinner, and am, 
with great regard, 

" Yours very kindly, 

''Henry W. Longfellow." 

I find by the next letter that I sent Long- 
fellow a set of Griswold's books, which I had 
recently re-edited with additions : 

"Camb., Jan. 14, 1878. 

" Dear Mr. Stoddard, —The three handsome 
volumes of Griswold have arrived safely, and I 
hasten to thank you for your great kindness in 
sending them to me. Though I have not had 
time to examine them carefully, yet I have glanced 
at them here and there, and see that they will be 
of much use to me. 

'' I wish I had possessed a copy of the ' Female 
Poets ' sooner. I should not then have missed 
those three striking poems by Mrs. Stoddard, ' The 
Bull-Fight,' ' El Capitano/ and ' On the Cam- 
pagna,' whose absence in * Poems of Places ' I 
much regret. 

** With many thanks for your careful kindness, 
" Yours very kindly, 

" Henry W. Longfellow." 

In the spring of 1878 I was asked to write 
a paper on Longfellow for one of our maga- 

280 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

zines, and, not being certain in my own 
mind as to the accuracy of several state- 
ments in the received biographies, I put 
myself in communication with him. Here 
is his reply : 

" Camb., April 20, 1878. 

" Dear Mr. Stoddard, — In the ' Homes of 
American Authors,' published by Putnam of your 
city in 1853, you will find on page 265 a view of 
the house in which I was born. It is still stand- 
ing, overlooking the harbcr, as you see in the 
picture. 

'* Before I was two years old the family re- 
moved to a house in the centre of the town. Of 
this house, where my childhood was passed, I 
send you a photograph. The upper room in the 
left-hand corner, with the open windows, was 
mine. 

** I am glad you are going to take the trouble 
of writing the sketch for Scribner. If there is to 
be any biography in it, please state that the family 
came from Yorkshire, not from Hampshire, as 
usually stated, and that my first wife died at 
Rotterdam, and not at Heidelberg. 

" This is perhaps of no great importance, but, 
generally speaking, fact is better in history than 
fiction. 

''Any other doubtful points I shall be happy to 
281 



RECOLLECTIONS 

settle for you, if you will put them in the form of 
questions. 

**You must greatly miss your friend Taylor. 
Still, I rejoice in his appointment. He will fill 
the place better than any other man. 
'' Yours very kindly, 

*' Henry W. Longfellow." 

I omit two or three notes which touch 
upon " Poems of Places," and give an ex- 
tract from a later one which was dated on 
May 19. " Accept my thanks," Longfellow 
wrote, " for your generous notice of ' Kera- 
mos' in the Independent, which I have read 
with pride and pleasure. I am never in- 
different, and never pretend to be, to what 
people say of my books. They are my chil- 
dren, and I like to have them liked. When 
I send you the volume of ' Poems of Places ' 
containing China, which I will do as soon 
as it is published, I hope you will not think 
I have taken too many of your ' Chinese 
Songs.'" 

The next letter from Longfellow, and the 

last I shall quote, refers to a poem which I 

read before the young gentlemen of Harvard. 

He came to hear me, but, as I preceded the 

282 



SOME LETTERS FROM LONGFELLOW 

orator, I missed the honour that he paid me, 
for I did not see him, though my wife caught 
a glimpse of him as he stole into Sanders 
Theatre. Here is what he wrote: 



"Camb., June 30, 1878. 

" Dear Mr. Stoddard, — I was very sorry and 
much disappointed not to see you and Mrs. Stod- 
dard when you were here last week. But it was 
such a busy week that I could not go to town in 
search of you, and probably should not have found 
you if I had gone. 

** I failed also to hear you deliver your poem. 
Being delayed by visitors, and thinking the poem 
would follow the oration, I arrived too late. 

" The next thing to hearing the poem is reading 
it. Thanks for the opportunity of doing so thus 
early. It is both vigorous and beautiful. The 
warlike ages you have described with a tumult 
of verse finely adapted to the theme. 

*' Fifty years ago, before the same Society, 
Bryant recited his poem ' The Ages ' in Spenserian 
stanzas. On the year of his death you take up 
the theme once more, and paint an Historic 
Picture in the same metre. Was it accident or 
design? I know not, but, whichever it was, the 
idea is very felicitous. I congratulate you on 
your success. 

283 



RECOLLECTIONS 

" I was glad to see Mr. Gifford. He made some 
capital sketches, with which I think you will be 
pleased. 

" Yours very kindly, 

" Henry W. Longfellow." 

To have followed in the footsteps of Bry- 
ant, and to have been praised by Longfellow, 
is to have pleasant memories. 



284 



XX 

WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 

NO American poet of note with whose 
life I am acquainted ever owed so 
little to circumstances or was ever 
so hampered by heredity as Whittier. By 
circumstances I mean the conditions of life 
in which he was born, the enforced restric- 
tions of his boyhood and youth, and the 
laborious task-work of his young manhood ; 
by heredity I mean whatever we may sup- 
pose he derived from his Quaker ancestors 
and their way of thinking and acting. He 
was unlettered when compared with Bryant, 
Longfellow, and Lowell, whose early asso- 
ciations were bookish and who were college- 
bred. He inherited probity and sincerity, 
conviction and earnestness, but with these 
sterling qualities, which were the fibre of his 
character, he inherited also, what seems to 
me, a certain narrowness of view and an in- 
tensity of feeling which if not unreasonable 
was sometimes intemperate and violent. 
285 



RECOLLECTIONS 

A poet should be dowered with " the hate 
of hate, the scorn of scorn," but he should 
also be dowered with the love of love. Liv- 
ing when and where Whittier did, he could 
not escape his moral environment, and, being 
what he was, he could not help the emo- 
tion which it created nor the indignation 
which it stimulated. It was in his blood 
to hate oppression, and that the white race 
in America oppressed the black race was 
a blot upon the white race, the removal of 
which cost hundreds of thousands of brave 
men and millions upon millions of hard- 
earned money. I do not blame Whittier 
for being an Abolitionist, for it was a dan- 
gerous honour to be one when he was, but 
I wish he had written less Abolition verse. 
It may have encouraged his brother Abo- 
litionists, if they needed encouragement, — 
which was hardly the case, I think, since 
fanaticism thrives when persecuted and " the 
blood of martyrs is the seed of the church," 
— and it may have made more Abolitionists, 
but all the same it was not poetry. 

The literary condition of the American 
people was neither active nor promising in 
286 



I 



WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 

the early decades of the nineteenth century, 
nor was it improved by the treatment to 
which it was subjected by English critics, 
who assumed that all books not written 
in their own " right little, tight little island " 
were necessarily provincial. " Who reads 
an American book ? " they asked ; and there 
was no answer until Irving and Cooper 
forced one from their unwilling lips. We 
took them more seriously than they de- 
served, and, resenting their disparagement, 
resolved to have a literature of our own. 
It was necessary that we should have one, 
and certain patriotic gentlemen among us 
who professed to be critics cudgelled their 
brains to discover what it should be. It 
must differ as much from English literature 
as our great New World differed from little 
old England, as much as our vigorous re- 
publican institutions differed from effete 
monarchical customs, as much, in a word, 
as two literatures written in the same lan- 
guage, by people of the same blood, could 
differ from one another. 

Our writers hearkened to our critics, — 
at any rate, some of them did, — and sought 
287 



RECOLLECTIONS 

to create this American Literature. Cooper 
discovered one element of it in our Revolu- 
tionary struggles, and was thought by some 
to have discovered another in the noble 
savage. There was a glamour about the 
Indians which captured our versifiers, who 
devoted themselves to the manufacture of 
epics, — Yamoydens, Powhatans, Fronte- 
nacs, — a fruitless industry, which received 
its quietus when Longfellow published " The 
Song of Hiawatha." 

Whittier was afflicted with this aboriginal 
contagion at twenty-eight, when he wrote 
*' Mogg Megone," and thirteen years later, 
when he wrote " The Bridal of Pennacook." 
These compositions abounded in vivid de- 
scriptions of forest scenery and the stock 
properties of Indian life, but they were not 
remarkable, for considered as stories they 
were not worth the telling, and considered 
as poems they were not poetical. The read- 
ing which led to them was valuable, how- 
ever, in that it was in historical directions, 
and if Whittier missed his way therein when 
he struck the Indian trail, he found it when 
he ventured into the by-ways of colonial tra- 
288 



WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 

dition, as in " Cassandra South wick," " The 
Exiles," and other of his early ballads. 

In balladry Whittier discovered the clue 
of his genius, but, not seeing whither it 
would 'lead him, he suffered it to slip from 
his fingers and went on without it, follow- 
ing whatever ignis fahius crossed his path. 
What most strongly attracted him to our 
colonial period were the darker features of 
the Puritan character, its narrowness of 
vision and its fierce intolerance, the cruelty 
that persecuted men of his faith for their 
peaceable ways, the fanaticism that hanged 
women and children of its own faith for 
being witches. This was an important ele- 
ment in American life, which demanded rec- 
ognition in American literature, and which 
obtained it in the ballads of Whittier as 
surely as its strangely supernatural ele- 
ment obtained recognition in the tales of 
Hawthorne. 

Reading the verse of Whittier in the order 
in which it was written, as nearly as I can 
arrive at it In the collected editions, I detect, 
as the years go on, more romantic and ten- 
der qualities than I noted at first, a wider 
19 289 



RECOLLECTIONS 

range of sympathy, and a greater maturity of 
thought, more precision and choice of expres- 
sion, sweeter and more varied melody, and 
throughout and above all the nameless some- 
thing which I feel to be Poetry. I hear every- 
where the still, sad music of humanity. 

The ethic element in much of Whittier's 
verse never at any time impressed me, ex- 
cept with profound respect for his manly 
and upright nature and the sincerity of his 
moral convictions. Personally I prefer ob- 
jective creation to subjective meditation in 
poetry, and consequently I find less to ad- 
mire in the latter manifestation of his genius 
than do most of his countrymen, to whom 
he is the noblest of lay-preachers. 

I never saw Whittier but once, and then 
it was not on a favourable occasion, though 
it was devised to show him honour. It was 
at a great breakfast at the Hotel Brunswick 
in Boston, and the day set apart for it was 
his seventieth birthday. As I had attended 
the celebration of Bryant's seventieth birth- 
day at the Century Club thirteen years 
before, I made a pilgrimage to Boston and 

290 



WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 

witnessed the celebration of this second sep- 
tuagenarian birthday. Everybody who had 
the least claim to be considered a man of 
letters, and many who had no claims at all, 
were present, — poets, novelists, historians, 
biographers, essayists, critics, journalists. 
There were more than a hundred of them; 
and, what with their irregular arrivals, the 
introductions in the anterooms, the greeting 
of old friends, the chat of new acquaint- 
ances, and the necessary waiting for some- 
body or something, they were all hungry 
when, at two o'clock in the afternoon, they 
sat down to breakfast. 

What the imaginative reporters called the 
splendid banquet-hall was at once a voracious 
and lively scene, the feast, as they declared, 
being worthy of Apicius, while the wit that 
set the table in a roar was worthy of Horace 
or — Holmes. The magnates sat apart by 
themselves, at the head of the horseshoe 
which the tables were supposed to rep- 
resent, — Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, 
Holmes, Howells, and Houghton ; the lesser 
lights twinkled farther down : they swallowed 
the oysters, gulped down the soup, devoured 
291 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the roasts, played with their pates, toyed with 
the chops, and sipped the white wine and the 
red. When their first fierce thirst was some- 
what satisfied, they drank to each other across 
the tables and lighted cigarettes. By and by 
they were rapped to order, the regular toasts 
were proposed, and were followed by the 
regular responses, the prepared impromptus 
which no one ever fully commits to memory. 

A great many speeches were made, and a 
great deal was said about American Litera- 
ture, mostly by young persons who had yet 
to learn what it was. They enjoyed the 
sound of their own voices and were ap- 
plauded, as politeness required. They began 
to separate at midnight, and I went over to 
where Whittier sat. I had a tolerable sonnet 
in my pocket, but I felt it was not the time 
nor the place to read it, for he was tired, I 
was tired, all were tired ; so I merely shook 
his hand once more. 

" Then, quitting the white wine and the red, 
I said * Good-Night,' and stole to bed." 

I corresponded with Whittier when I had 
anything that I wished to say, but not as 
292 



WHITTIER'S SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY 

often as I might have done, for I remembered 
the difference in our ages, and, besides, I was 
always averse from personal communications ; 
for, call me what they may, neither my friends 
nor my foes can call me a man of letters. 
I must have written to Whittier, however, 
oftener than I remember, for I find a note of 
his, in reply to some opinion of mine, prob- 
ably about his memorial poems on Charles 
Sumner, which I greatly admired : 

" Amesbury, 6 Mo. 13, 1870. 
" Dear Frd, — Thanks for thy kind words about 
my poem, I wish I could feel satisfied with it 
Reading it over in print now, I see its faults, 
though I am not sure that I could correct them. 
If, however, such critics and authors as Stedman 
and thyself do not regard it as a failure, I am 
somewhat reassured. 

" I remember thy own fine poems of this kind — 
Thackeray particularly. All are good. I shall 
be happy to see thee if thy feet ever lead in this 
direction. 

" Very truly thy frd. 

''John G. Whittier." 

Some twelve years later than this, when 
Longfellow^ died, full of years and honours, I 
undertook to prepare a medley in prose and 
293 



RECOLLECTIONS 

verse wherein his life and work should be 
estimated, however imperfectly, and when it 
was finished I asked Whittier to allow me to 
dedicate it to him. Here is his reply: 

"Danvers, Mass., 6 Mo. i, 1882. 

"My dear frd Stoddard, — I have just 
reached here from Amesbury, and find thy proofs 
awaiting me. I have looked over them with 
great satisfaction, though I sometimes take ex- 
ceptions to thy critical estimate of some of dear 
Longfellow's poems, which may not be equal to 
others, but which I like too well to find any 
fault with. But as a whole thy book is a noble 
tribute, and I like especially its opening pages, the 
description of young Longfellow and his surround- 
ings. I am very glad to have my name associated 
with it in thy dedication, and thank thee for the 
kindly way in which I am mentioned in the book. 

" I have just got my friend Underwood's book, 
but have not had time to read it. It is elegantly 
got up, and will, I doubt not, be found interesting, 
for he had great opportunities as the first editor of 
the At. Monthly f and as a resident for some years 
in Cambridge. 

" I presume the family of L. will have a larger 
and fuller biography sooner or later. 

** I am ever and truly thy friend. 

'' John G. Whittier." 



294 



XXI 

OUR HOME IN FIFTEENTH STREET 

JUST before our little Willy was four 
years old there came to keep him com- 
pany in the flowery garden of child- 
hood, a little brother, with the same hair and 
eyes as his own. He came on earth, how- 
ever, only to leave it after a few months' 
life. I embalmed his innocent memory in 
two short stanzas : 

I am followed by a spirit, 

In my sorrow, and my mirth ; 

'T is the spirit of an infant, 
Dying almost at its birth, 

Unlamented, but how dear, 

Since unseen, I know 't is near ! 

Would, if only for a moment, 

As I feel it, I could see, 
In the light of heavenly beauty, 

Sitting on its father's knee ! 
It would dry this hopeless tear, 
Dropping now, it is so near ! 
295 



RECOLLECTIONS 

We pursued the even tenor of our way, I 
attending to my daily duties in the Custom- 
House, and now and then writing a lyric, 
just to keep my hand in, and Mrs. Stoddard 
attending to her duties as wife and mother, 
and carefully cultivating her mind. Her 
powers struck deeper and shot higher, and 
her stories of New England life and char- 
acter were marked by keen insight and 
strange dramatic power. No other Amer- 
ican woman could have written them, for 
their like was never written before, and 
has never been written since, except by 
herself. 

The ninth anniversary of our marriage 
came and went, and we looked forward, if 
not to happy days, which nobody could ex- 
pect then, — for war had broken out between 
the North and South, — at least to a con- 
tinuance of temperate happiness. 

Six or seven years before, when I was 
writing the small poems that I published 
under the title of "Songs of Summer," I 
wrote from an imaginary sorrow a little 
poem called " The Shadow." Here is the 
first stanza : 

296 



OUR HOME IN FIFTEENTH STREET 

There is but one great sorrow, 

All over the wide, wide world ; 
But that in turn must come to all — 
The Shadow that moves behind the pall, 

A flag that is never furled ! 

The first great sorrow of our lives came 
to us in December, 1861. Our little Willy, 
who was in his seventh year, was taken ill 
on a Monday morning. On Tuesday morn- 
ing I went down to the Custom-House in 
order to get excused for the day, on account 
of his illness. I reached home early in the 
forenoon and found the boy — dead. A 
thunderbolt dropped out of heaven at my 
feet could not have startled me more than 
this sudden taking off of our beautiful one. 

There was nothing serious in mortality to 
me from that fatal day — nothing ! For, as 
I had sung ignorantly in " The Shadow," 
how ignorantly ! — 

'T is a blow that we never recover, 
A wound that never will heal ! 

My friend Launt Thompson, who had 
made a medallion of the lad the previous 
summer, came to the house that night and 
took a cast of his little dead hand. That 

297 



RECOLLECTIONS 

cast, the medallion, and a lock of curly 
golden hair, are all that remind me that my 
son Willy ever lived ; only these, and a sor- 
rowful but immortal memory. What was 
he was taken to Mattapoisett and interred in 
an old burying-ground there. 

His death nearly killed his mother, and if 
the hearts of men could break would have 
broken my heart. At a later period, I cele- 
brated his glorious little life and sudden death 
in the saddest verses that I ever wrote. 

When I mentioned Mrs. Stoddard's poems 
and stories I should have spoken of her 
novels, — " The Morgesons," " Two Men," and 
" Temple House." They are the most orig- 
inal and most powerful novels ever written 
by an American woman, and, like her shorter 
stories, grip hold of the stern, hard realities 
of New England life. She had no superior, 
unless it be Hawthorne, as a student of 
character, and as a delineator of live men 
and women. She could be humorous, and 
she could be pathetic. She was thought to 
have more of the quality called genius than 
I, who certainly had more talent than she. 
298 



OUR HOME IN FIFTEENTH STREET 

My poetry is my best work, but one can- 
not live by poetry, which must be to most 
poets its own exceeding great reward. I 
taught myself to write prose, and produced 
two little books for children, " Adventures in 
Fairyland," and " Town and Country." The 
children of that time liked them, though I 
could never bring myself to do so. 

I edited a series of " Bric-a-brac " books, 
which everybody thought good. I also con- 
tributed to all the magazines in the country, 
and to more newspapers than I can remem- 
ber, and on all subjects, except theology and 
politics. 

I have said nothing, so far, of the little 
bird that flew to our door one December 
forenoon about two years after our little 
Willy flew away. He was thought to be a 
clever lad, was Lorimer Stoddard, though 
he had the good sense not to think so 
himself. He was tall for his age, slight 
of build, addicted to reading everything 
except poetry, for which he cared noth- 
ing, greatly to the joy of his father, who 
thought that there were altogether too 
many poets. 

299 



RECOLLECTIONS 

We lived in New York, as I have said, in 
an unpretending little house in East Fif- 
teenth Street. If I should attempt to char- 
acterise our home in a few words, I should 
say that it was nearly such a home as all 
authors ought to have. It is plainly fur- 
nished, but is full of good books, and good 
pictures, most of which were painted by our 
artist friends. The books are all English, of 
course, for we had only such education as 
we had given ourselves ; but they are all 
good books. 

There is a room over the library which is 
full of books and engravings. Here I have 
kept my collection of English poetry, new 
and old, which is an excellent one, my 
friends say when they consult it, as Mr. 
Stedman did when he was writing his " Vic- 
torian Poets." I have kept my autographs 
here also, and my books which once belonged 
to great men. 

I could show you the books of Byron, 
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey, Lamb, 
Leigh Hunt, Campbell, Gray, Pope, Sterne, 
Churchill, and many other famous English 
poets; and I could show you a mahogany 
300 



OUR HOME IN FIFTEENTH STREET 

box full of manuscripts from Cowper and 
Shenstone, and Sheridan and Moore, and 
Shelley and Sir Walter Scott and Burns 
and Barry Cornwall, and Leigh Hunt and 
all the famous American poets of the nine- 
teenth century. I could also show you a 
lock of the hair of John Milton.^ 

1 This chapter was written earlier than some of its prede- 
cessors — before the books and manuscripts to which it refers 
were presented to the Authors Club. — R. H. 



301 



THE LAST YEARS 



XXII 
THE LAST YEARS 1 

THE difference between the old 
Friends' Seminary, in Stuyvesant 
Square, and the garish Waldorf- 
Astoria indicates measurably the difference 
between the daily life of Richard Henry 
Stoddard and the life of the great New 
York thoroughfares and marts. For nearly 
half a century he had been a tenant of Peter 
Stuyvesant's Bowery farm, and the grace 
and beauty of the nature which had once 
clothed a pastoral landscape were subtly 
preserved in his verse. In the early sixties 
he was a tent-mate of his friend Bayard Tay- 
lor on East Thirteenth Street near the Peter 
Stuyvesant pear-tree. From 1866 to 1870 
the home of the Stoddards was at " The 
Deanery," the name waggishly given to 

1 The death of Mr. Stoddard before the pubhcation of 
his book has rendered the addition of this supplementary 
chapter desirable. — R. H. 

20 305 



RECOLLECTIONS 

the boarding-house of Miss Anne Swift, at 
No. 75 East Tenth Street. " The Deanery" 
was the temporary camping-place of many 
literary folk, among them the Taylors and 
the Stedmans. At " The Deanery " there 
were nights made ambrosial by the gather- 
ings and informal feasts of brilliant men and 
women of letters, but there were also gloomy 
days. One of them must have been Febru- 
ary 8, 1870, when Mrs. Stoddard wrote in 
her diary, " Stoddard was turned out of the 
Custom-House yesterday without warning." 

It was not long after this that the Stod- 
dards removed to Fifteenth Street, east of 
Stuyvesant Square, and took possession of 
the first of a long line of little brick houses, 
whose sternly conventional, impossible iron 
balconies represent an early effort which 
was conscious of failure. Up to the last this 
was the home of Mr. Stoddard, of his wife, 
with her intense individuality and illuminat- 
ing genius, and of the brilliant son.^ It was 
here that the morning of May 12, 1903, 

1 Lorimer Stoddard, who won a marked success as a 
dramatist, died in the latter part of August, 1901, and Mrs. 
Stoddard died on August i, 1902. 

306 



THE LAST YEARS 

brought rest to the poet, full of years and 
weariness and longing for the end. 

Mr. Stoddard's sketch of his home, which 
appears in the preceding chapter, — the last 
of his* " Recollections," — is full of personal 
quality, but it is only suggestive of the rich- 
ness of his literary treasures, and the dis- 
tinctive atmosphere of a house which, for 
over thirty years, was a centre of literary 
interest. In his " Recollections," after the 
earlier years, it will be noticed that while 
Mr. Stoddard's concern with letters is con- 
stantly in evidence, he has little to say of 
the literary journey-work which occupied his 
well-filled days. His bibliography is a suffi- 
cient testimonial to his industry, and yet it 
fails to exhibit his professional labour as 
newspaper critic and magazine contributor. 
His journalistic duties as the literary editor 
of the World from i860 to 1870, editor of the 
short-lived Aldine at a later period, and liter- 
ary editor of the Mail and Express from 1880 
to his death, meant in themselves a record of 
work which many a man would have consid- 
ered sufficient. To Mr. Stoddard's mind this 
represented the minor part of his productive 
307 



RECOLLECTIONS 

life. After he left the Custom-House in 
1870, he increased his business experiences 
for three years as private secretary of Gen. 
George B. McClellan, Commissioner of 
Docks, in New York. For a year he was 
City Librarian, and there were various edito- 
rial tasks which intervened between the two 
long periods of his direct connection with 
daily journalism. All this was essential to 
the honest bread- winning of his busy life; but 
it was not his best life, and his maintenance 
of his singularly exalted literary standards 
was an index to the quality of the man. 

As the years went on, Mr. Stoddard saw 
the passing of one after another of his group 
until but one of that choir was left, — one 
whose infinite tenderness to his elder friend 
was of the company of David's affection for 
Jonathan, and Charles Lamb's love for his 
stricken sister. In the last years there were 
comparatively few visitors to the poet's home, 
— the brother poet who cared for him so jeal- 
ously, the physician and friend who guarded 
him, the lawyer whose responsibilities were 
accounted as nothing when a summons 
came from " Dick," a representative of the 
308 



THE LAST YEARS 

newspaper — the Mail and Express — whicli 
honoured itself in maintaining its recog- 
nition of Mr. Stoddard and a few other 
friends. To these visitors it was given to 
see th6 dauntless courage of a sorely stricken 
old age. Weighted by failing eyesight and 
grievous bodily afiflictions/ he made a jest 
of his misfortunes. It was in this vein that 
he wrote a friend, a few years since : 

** I go to the hospital to-morrow to have my 
second cataract removed, and I hope to be out in 
three or four weeks ; at least I have the doctor's 
opinion to that effect. It 's lucky, is n't it, that I 
am not Argus? Think of not seeing anything as 
it should be seen, and of a hundred eyes, and the 
calamity of having each one of them peeled at one 
time or another ! " 

There were certain subjects which re- 
mained wholly foreign to the atmosphere 
of the poet's library. He lived in New 
York, but the omnipotent name of the 
stock market was never heard, nor mention 
of the talismanic word " society," and few of 
the current topics which serve the idle hours 

1 Mr. Stoddard suffered from partial paralysis of his 
right hand, from rheumatism, and from cataract. 

309 



RECOLLECTIONS 

of drawing-rooms and clubs. Chaucer and 
Spenser, Keats and Shelley, and later comers 
whom he had known himself, like Thackeray, 
Poe, Hawthorne, and Lowell, were often of 
the company to which the magnate of money 
or commerce, pure and simple, or the " social 
leader," found no admission. 

His social interests, outside the close-knit 
circle of his friends, were centred in his 
beloved Century and in the Authors Club. 
A member of the Century since 1863, he 
followed the affairs of the club with an af- 
fectionate interest unabated by the passage 
of forty years. After the infirmities of age 
forbade his presence, there was never a 
monthly meeting of which he failed to ask 
a full account. It was with sincere feeling 
that he said in his poem at the fiftieth 
anniversary : 

"... The Century 
Has been, and is, so much to me, 
So much that when I come to die, 
I think 't would ease my parting sigh, 
If I could know that someone here 

Would think of me when all was done, 
And say, betwixt a smile and tear, 
He was a good Centurion ! " 
310 



THE LAST YEARS 

With the sensitive modesty which was 
so real a part of Mr. Stoddard's true char- 
acter, he shrank at first from the pubHc 
honour implied in the dinner tendered him 
by the" Authors Club in 1897, ^^^ his ap- 
preciation of that testimonial can hardly be 
indicated in words. " What is there in this 
battered old hulk that you care for it so 
kindly, so generously, so lovingly," he wrote 
to a friend who was a member of the club. 
'Twill try to think there is something since 
you think so." Those who recall that din- 
ner, in which the Century as well as the 
Authors Club took so conspicuous a part, 
will not forget the ovation which followed 
the close of the touching poem spoken 
by the venerable poet — the central figure 
of the most memorable literary occasion in 
New York since the celebration of Bryant's 
birthday. 

After this dinner it seemed peculiarly 
difficult for Mr. Stoddard to express the 
appreciation which he felt so deeply. It 
was his frequent theme — this recognition 
which he felt to be the crowning honour of 
his life, — and it was this feeling which was 
311 



RECOLLECTIONS 

expressed in his desire that the choicest of his 
books and manuscripts should be presented 
to the Authors Club. He made known his 
generous plan to a few friends, and one of 
them was asked to convey his purpose to the 
club. And so, after a time, these rare vol- 
umes, manuscripts, and letters were arranged 
and catalogued with the aid of the wonder- 
ful memory which Mr. Stoddard kept almost 
to the last. It was within less than a year 
before his death that the Authors Club 
received from him the gift which, with the 
possible exception of the Lorimer Graham 
Library at the Century, is probably the 
finest purely literary offering that has been 
made to an American club library. 

Like every sturdy, uncompromising in- 
dividuality, Mr. Stoddard roused antago- 
nisms, sometimes by the spoken, sometimes 
by the written word. His standards were 
high for letters and for m.en, and he hated 
smug literary affectation, or moral cowardice, 
with all the force of a singularly vigorous 
nature. If he was frank in denouncing 
shams, however, he was equally prompt to 
point out promise or performance, and all 
312 



THE LAST YEARS 

that he said was sure to be infused with a 
spirit due to long and reverent association 
with the masters of English letters. 

How bravely Mr. Stoddard bore himself 
in those closing years is known only to a 
few. The premature death of his brilliant 
son Lorimer left the aged poet and his wife 
— " that woman of strange, impassioned 
genius" — sitting beside a hearth where the 
fire had gone out for ever. But there was no 
self-pity nor despair. " Baffled, not beaten ! " 
was his answer to a friend who came to him 
soon after Lorimer's death ; and this was the 
keynote of the mood in which he waited 
death after the loss of his wife. The cour- 
age inherited from a race of New England 
sailors, and shown in his steadfast allegiance 
to his ideals, remained with him to the end, 
and he met death without question and 
without a trace of fear. 

At his death there came home to us the 
full significance of the lines given with a 
touch of wistful pathos in " The Curtain 
CaH":^ 

^ The poem recited by Mr. Stoddard at the Authors 
Club dinner. 



RECOLLECTIONS 

^'When this life-play of mine is ended, 
And the black curtain has descended, 
Think kindly as you can of me, 
And say, for you may truly say, 

' This dead player, living, loved his part, 
And made it noble as he could, 
Not for his own poor, personal good, 

But for the glory of his art ! ' " 



On May 14th the funeral services were 
held at the Church of the Messiah in New 
York, in the presence of a company repre- 
sentative in the best sense of American 
letters. The identification with literature of 
both the officiating clergymen — the Rev. 
Dr. Minot J. Savage and the Rev. Dr. 
Robert Collyer — gave a peculiar fitness 
to their charge of the simple ceremonies. 
Dr. Collyer's address was as follows: 

" I would fain have found another man who 
would take my place this afternoon, and say some 
fitting word touching the life of the dear old 
friend whose dust will be borne hence to the 
burial — some closer comrade, some brother be- 
loved in the brotherhood of letters, — shall I say 
far more intimate and close of kin in this kinship? 
— and whose words would be most welcome. 

" For he was a man worthy the best that can be 

314 



THE LAST YEARS 

said as we stay together these few moments, touch- 
ing the man he was, and the work he has done 
in the threescore and seventeen years, of which 
the last years were heavy with labor and sorrow, 
borne with a courage and patience only known 
to his nearest and dearest friends, — the years 
when he sat in his home, old and blind and 
bereaven, and might well have cried with the 
psalmist, ' O that I had wings like a dove, then 
would I flee away and be at rest.' And when we 
hold these years in our remembrance, as we must 
this day, I have asked myself, and would ask you, 
if this is not the time for our hearts to be touched 
with a sweet and solemn joy, rather than with 
sorrow, that, having served his generation, he has 
fallen on sleep, to awaken where there shall be 
no more death, neither sorrow nor crying, neither 
shall there be any more pain, and the scripture 
is fulfilled, — thou shalt be gathered as a shock of 
corn fully ripe. We would love to have him with 
us, as he was before the years drew nigh when 
he must say I have no pleasure in them, the 
pleasant and cheerful man we knew before the 
fire burnt so low on the hearthstone, and he must 
feel for the empty chairs he could not see, and 
long for the touch of a vanished hand, and the 
sound of a voice that was still ; for in all my life 
and ministry I have wondered whether I have 
stood by the dust of one so touched with a pathos 
for which we can find no words, and for which 
indeed silence is golden. 

315 



RECOLLECTIONS 

" It was my own good fortune to meet him more 
than twenty years ago, when he was in his later 
prime, and to talk with him often about the work 
he had done, and was still doing, of the books he 
loved, and the men he had known and loved for 
their work's sake or for their own sake ; and these 
are all good memories, for this good reason, that I 
soon found he had gathered the honey he would 
give me from the flowers of genius and grace he 
had found in the many years, but had no store 
from the wormwood of our human life or the roots 
of bitterness. And those were especially days to 
be marked with a white stone when his voice would 
fall into a soft and tender cadence as he would talk 
by the hour of the men he had known and the 
books he loved, so that in the many years of my 
own life I feel sure I have never found his match 
in this treasure, while he was still shy of speaking 
about himself and what he had done, as if this 
was no great matter. Only once, when I told him 
of some word I had read about one of his poems, 
which he had not seen, he blushed like a maiden, 
and a light came into his eyes that was not of the 
sun, and then I seemed to know, — the man within 
the man. Not about himself he would speak, but 
when you read the briefs now printed of what he 
has done in all these years, where will you find a 
nobler record, — I will not say of genius, but of 
man? — a man who must work first of all and last 
of all for his Hving, and to make a happy fireside 
cHme for wean and wife, while he still must be true 
316 



THE LAST YEARS 

to his noble gift of poesy and his inspiration from 
on high. When you read these briefs that have 
been printed of his Hfe, through more than sixty 
years, so faithful and true to our primal trust of 
manhood and husband, and then the tale of what 
he has (ione beside, through his election from on 
high, I know not how you feel, but I want to say, 
here is another and a nobler Richard of the lion 
heart. I know somewhat in my poor degree of 
what these things mean, of ' The harvest hand that 
gets you bread,' and ' The heart that stays con- 
tent ; ' and so, not first for his great and precious 
gift I would lay my wreath on his grave, but 
for the brave and steadfast workingman blindness 
could not carve, and for this also I would say, 
Blessed is he now, for he rests from his labor, 
and his works do follow him. 

*' Of his works as these lie in his books others 
will speak, I doubt not, otherwheres, and to a finer 
purpose than I could hope to speak if there was 
time and these were the moments. I wanted only 
to speak of the man who has won and held my 
heart, as I doubt not he has won and held yours, 
whose own words come home to me this day. 

" ' He has gone to the dear and holy Dead,' 

let us not forget the path he trod. 

" ' He has done with us — 
He has gone to God.' " 



317 



RECOLLECTIONS 

On the following day the venerable poet 
was laid at rest beside his wife and son in 
the little rural cemetery at Sag Harbor, 
close beside the sea. There, underneath the 
trees, Mr. Stedman bade farewell to his friend 
in these words : 

*' Year before last, on Labor Day, we brought to 
this beautiful resting place the remains of an only 
son, a man of artistic and literary gifts. It was 
then my pious duty, at the bidding of his parents, 
to speak the tribute to his life and talents that was 
his due. In the course of the next summer, here 
were laid the ashes of his mother — of that woman 
endowed with strange, impassioned genius, and 
resolute in her comprehension of both the son 
and the husband who with her made up a trio 
unmatched in personality and interest. 

" This wife and mother had spent her vitality in 
soothing her loyal son throughout his premature 
decline ; yet still found strength to restore her 
husband from a prostration which we thought was 
mortal, and then, like Alcestis, gave herself in his 
stead to the grave. The respite which she gained 
for him has been passed in fulfilment of those 
offices of tenderness and duty to which they both 
were pledged ; and now, with these all completed, 
and with little left for which he cared to tarry in 
this world — be it sunlit or wintry — he follows her 
as he had wished. And so to-day we have only to 

318 



THE LAST YEARS 

lay his form between two graves, and to consecrate 
this space, which he prepared for it, to rest and 
peace and hope, and the reverence of the Hving 
now and hereafter. 

*' This is not the hour to dwell upon the career 
or the genius of the literary master, the poet, the 
friend whom we bury here. The house of the 
Stoddards dies with him, but he and his, in song 
and story, have vivified the name beyond extinc- 
tion. His hfe, though without Hberty of travel and 
indulgence, was proud and felicitous. However 
pathetic his afflictions, his deprivations, seemed, 
he had what he desired — the tasks for which he 
longed, the fellowship of books and writers, the 
happy labor by which for sixty years he gained 
— this American of the old breed — a manly, in- 
dependent support, and which brought to him a 
noble fame. He had the wisdom that understands 
the conditions that m.ake for or against one's craft, 
and he met all trials in the spirit of a soldier who 
makes no fuss about his wounds because wounds 
are the chance of all. He might wince and satir- 
ize and flout, but no one ever heard him whine. If 
to labor is to pray, he was not only the staunchest 
but the most religious of us all. 

" He wedded the only woman he ever loved, and 
with her lived content beyond expression. His 
songs have travelled far, his name is dear to the 
world, and dearest to those who knew him best. 
Of all poets he had most considered Death, and 
of all he was most prepared to meet it. Yet to 

319 



RECOLLECTIONS 

some of us the opening lines to a still unprinted 
lyric, which he wrote after his wife's departure and 
carried about with him to his last day, seem our 
own natural expression : 

" ^ Early or late, come when it will, 
At midnight, or at noon, 
Promise of good or threat of ill, 
Death always comes too soon.' 

"Too soon for us who stay behind, but not for 
him summoned at the apt moment of his desire. 
Leave him reunited with his own, upon this mar- 
gin of the sea which bred into their ancestral lines 
its substance and being, and whose moist breezes 
soon will make green the grass above their 
graves." 

This was the closing scene of a career 
strenuous as few lives are, and crowned with 
lasting achievement. 



320 



APPENDIX 

Mr. Stoddard's bibliography has been 
taken from the Manual of the Authors Club, 
with some slight revision. 

Author of — Footprints (1848) ; Poems (1852); 
Adventures in Fairy-Land (1853); Songs of Sum- 
mer (1857); Town and Country (1857); Life, 
Travels, and Books of Alexander von Humboldt 
(i860) ; The King's Bell, /^^;;2 (1863) ; The Story 
of Little Red Riding Hood, /^^;;/ (1865); The 
Children in the ^ood, poem (1865); Abraham 
Lincoln: a Horatian Ode (1865); The Book of 
the East (1867); Putnam the Brave (1869); A 
Century After (1876) ; William C. Bryant (1879) ; 
Poems (i 880) ; Life of Washington Irving ( 1 886) ; 
The Lion's Club, with Other Verse (1890); Under 
the Evening Lamp (1892); Recollections (1903). 

Editor of — The Last Political Writings of Gen. 
Nathaniel Lyon (1861); The Loves and Heroines 
of the Poets (1861); Essays of George Brimley 
(1861); John Guy Vassar's Twenty-one Years 
Round the World (1862); Melodies and Madrigals 
(1865); The Late English Poets (1865); RufusW. 
21 321 



APPENDIX 

Griswold's Poets and Poetry of America, enlarged 
ed. (1872); Female Poets of America (1874); The 
Aldine (1869-74); The Bric-a-Brac Series (1874- 
j6)\ Anecdote Biography of Shelley (1876) ; Henry 
Wadsworth Longfellow: a Medley in Prose and 
Verse (1882); English Verse, in five volumes, 
edited with W. J. Linton (1883) ; Romeo and 
Juliet (1892). 



322 



INDEX 



INDEX 



"Absalom," Willis's, y^ 
Addison, Joseph, 71, 109 
" Adventures in Fairyland," 

Stoddard's, 299 
"After a Tempest," Bryant's, 

quotation frona, 273 
^/dwu, They 187 
Alcott, Bronson, 117 
Aldine, The, Stoddard editor of, 

" Alice of Monmouth," Sted- 

man's, 268 
Allston, Washington, 71 
" Alnwick Castle," Halleck's, 

T^T^. 173 
"Annabel Lee," Poe's, 154, 155 
"Ariel in the Cloven Pine," 

Taylor's, 55 
"Atalantas," Simms's, no 
Atherton, Hon. Charles G., 134, 

135 
Atlantic Monthly, The, 103, 104 
Authors Club, The, 310-312 

Barlow, Joel, 167, 230 
" Barry Cornwall." See Procter. 
Bates, Attorney-General, 268 
Beattie, James, 23, 31 
" Bedouin Song," Taylor's, 247 
" Beleaguered City, The," Long- 
fellow's, 96 
"Bells, The," Poe's, 154 
Benedict, James L., 138, 142 
Benjamin, Park, 42-47 ; charac- 
teristics and education, 42, 43 ; 



power in journalism, 43, 44 ; 
kindness to Stoddard, 44-47 ; 
and see 25, 91, 182 

Bibliography of Stoddard, 321, 
322 

Blessington, Lady, 84 

Bliss, Elam, 75, 76 

Boker, George H,, letters to 
Stoddard, 180-200; intimacy 
with Taylor and Stoddard, 
180-183 ; his dramas, 184- 
186,195-199; on literary style, 
186, 187 ; on Tennyson, 189, 
190; on the popular maga- 
zines, 190, 191 ; on poetry, 
191-195 ; and see 58, 203, 204, 
258, 270 

Bonaparte, Joseph, 45, 46 

Boston Recorder^ The, first reli- 
gious paper, 71, 72 

Bowring, John, 15 

" Bridal of Pennacook, The," 
Whittier's, 288 

Briggs, Charles F. ("Harry 
Franco"), 137, 154 

Broadway Journal, The, 146, 148, 
149 

Brome, Alexander, quotation 
from, 251 

"Brook Farmers," 124, 125 

Brown, Charles Brockden, 155 

Browning, Robert, 175, 184, 186, 
1 88, 274, 27s 

Bryant, William Cullen, com- 
pared with Willis, 73 ; 226- 



325 



INDEX 



243; heredity, 226; pictures 
of New England life, 227-232 ; 
environment, 232-234; "The 
Embargo/' 234, 235 ; " Thana- 
topsis," dawn of American 
poetry, 235, 236; editor Even- 
ing Post, 236-238 ; his poetic 
gift, 238-240 ; kindness to 
Stoddard, 240-242 ; and see 
43. 76, 97> 162, 163, 259, 260, 
270, 272, 273, 283, 285 

Brydges, Sir Egerton, 181 

Bulwer, 84, 216, 276 

"Burns," Halleck's, 172, 173 

Burns, Robert, 31, 150 

Byron, 71, 77, 87, 97, 150, 167, 
183, 184, 211, 246 

" Calaynos," Boker's, 196, 198 
California Ballads, Taylor's, 59 
Campbell, Thomas, 165, 175 
Cary, Alice, 129, 174 
Cary, Phoebe, 59 
Century Club, The, Thackeray's 
liking for, 217; and see 241, 

" Champagne Rose," Kenyon's, 
quotation from, 250 

Channing, William Ellery, 132 

Chaucer, 186, 310 

Christopher North, 77 

Clark, Lewis Gaylord, 26, 47, 49, 
180 

Clark, Willis Gaylord, 76 

Clemm, Mrs. Maria, Poe's 
mother-in-law, 157, 158 

Cobb, Sylvan us, 24 

Coleridge, 71, 77, 93, 193, 210 

Coleridge, Hartley, 115 

Collyer, Reverend Robert, ad- 
dress at Stoddard's funeral, 

314-317 
Cooper, James Fenimore, 85, 
287, 288 



Copyright, International, 191 
Cowley, Abraham, quotation 

from, 57 
Cowper, 31, 92, 253 
Cozzens, Frederick S,, 218, 219 
'♦Croaker Papers, The," 169- 

171, 176 
" Curtain Call, The," Stoddard's, 

quotation from, 314 
Cushman, Charlotte, 184 

Dante, 97, 98 

Davidson, Lucretia and Mar- 
garet, 161 

Dawes, Rufus, 161 

" Deanery, The," 305, 306 

" Diamond Wedding, The," 
Stedman's, 171, 262 

Dickens, 24, 25 ' 

Disraeli, 85 

Drake, Joseph Rodman, friend- 
ship with Halleck, 165 ; mar- 
riage, 166; "The Croaker 
Papers," 169-17 1 ; and see 
162, 167, 172 

Dumas, Thackeray on, 224, 225 

Duyckincks, The (Evert A. and 
George L.), 91 

Dwight, Timothy, 167 

Edwards, Jonathan, 59 

" Embargo, The," Bryant's, 234 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, loi, 

133. 203, 291 
" Endymion," Keats's, 150 
English, Thomas Dunn, 154 
" Epistle from Mount Tmolus," 

Taylor's, 247 
" Essays on Art," Goethe's, 97 
"Eureka," Poe's, 158 
Evening Post, The N. Y., Bry- 
ant editor of, 236-238; and 
see 170, 171, 242 



326 



INDEX 



"Fable for Critics, A," Low- 
ell's, 89, 91 

Falconer, William, 23, 31 

"Fanny," Halleck's, 171, 172 

Fields, James T,, 66, 116, 214, 
271-273 

" Footprints," Stoddard's, iii 

Forrest,* Edwin, 24 

"Francesca da Rimini," Boker's, 
196-198 

" Freshet, The," Stedman's, 264 

Fuller, Margaret, 133 

GiFFORD, William, 77 

Godey, L. A., 154 

Godwin, Parke, 227 

Goethe, 97 

" Gold," Benjamin's, 45 

Goldsmith, Oliver, 71 

Goodrich, Samuel Griswold 
(" Peter Parley"), success of, 
74-76; and see 16, 78, 79 

Gould, Hannah F., 161 

Graham, George R., Boker on, 
190, 191 ; and see 154 

Graham, Lorimer, 312 

Grahani's Alagaziiie, loi, 159, 
162 

Gray, Thomas, 165 

Greeley, Horace, 43, 154 

Griswold, Rufus W., fashion to 
abuse, 58 ; rigid Calvinist, 59; 
kindness to Stoddard, iii, 112, 
^45» ^53; riot unfriendly to 
Poe, 145, 155; and see 91, 
129, 162, 174 

Hackett, James H., 218 

Hale, Sarah J., 76 

Halleck, Fitz-Greene, 162-179; 
his poetry, 162, 163; parentage 
and training, 164; association 



Croaker Papers," 169-171; 
his best work, 172, 173 ; occu- 
pation similar to Stoddard's, 
174; resemblance to Lamb and 
"Barry Cornwall," 175, 176; 
not an admirer of Tennyson, 
Browning, or Thackeray, 175, 
177 ; modesty of, 177 ; funeral 
of, 177-179; and see 71, 76, 
218, 237 

" Harrison on the English Lan- 
guage," 187 

"Harry Franco." See Brig^^s. 

Hart, John S., 185 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, early 
lack of appreciation of, "jd, 77 ; 
acquaintance with Stoddard, 
116-133; "The Wayside," 
II 7-1 20 ; personal appearance 
of, 121, 122; some letters 
from, 126-131 ; his opinion 
of the "Tanglewood Tales," 
127; of Stoddard's "The 
King's Bell," 129, 130; of 
Mrs. Stoddard's "The Mor- 
gesons," 131; "The Old 
Manse," 132, 133; and see 
loi, 155, 310 

Hawthorne, Mrs. Nathaniel, 121, 
124 

Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 44, 
91 

HoldeJi's Dollar Magazine, 137 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 291 
Home Journal y The, 86, %"] , 

173 
Hood, Thomas, 171 
" How Old Brown took Har- 
per's Ferry," Stedman's, zb^ 
Howells, William Dean, 291 
Howland, Judge Henry E., 30S 
Hoyt, Reverend Ralph, 37-42, 
44, 91, 114, 182 



with Drake, 165, 166; "The | Hunt, Leigh, 39, 167 



INDEX 



Ingraham, Joseph H., personal 
appearance, 23 ; early fictions, 
24 ; Hebrew romances, 24, 25 

"In Memoriam," Tennyson's, 
189 

Irving, Washington, 15, 71, 85, 
287 

James, G. P. R., 25 

Johnson, Dr., 109, 170 

Jonson, Ben, quotation from, 
208, 209 

Judson, Edward ("Ned Bunt- 
line"), 24 

Judson, Mrs. ("Fanny For- 
r-ester "), 86 

Keats, Stoddard's admiration 

of, 39, 56, 150; and see 77, 

310 
Kenyon, John, 250 
Kimball, Richard B., 58 
Kirkland, Caroline M., editor 

Union Magazine^ 50, 51 ; and 

see III, 154 
Knickerbocker Magazine, The, 26, 

47-49; 180, 181, 184, 187 

Lamb, Charles, Halleck com- 
pared to, 175, 176; and see 77, 
164, 179, 182 

Landor, Walter Savage, 181 

" Legendary, The," 76 

Leslie, Charles R., 75 

Lever, Charles, 25 

"Life of Humboldt," Stod- 
dard's, 253, 254 

Lincoln, Stoddard's Ode on, 177 

Lind, Jenny, 60 

Literary World, The, 183 

" Little Billee," Thackeray's, 
quotation from, 218 

Lockhart, John G., 77 



Longfellow, Henry Wads worth, 
270-284; home at Nahant, 
272-274 ; literary reputation 
not to be measured by mod- 
ern standards, 274, 275; per- 
sonal manner, 275 ; some 
letters from, 276-284 ; not in- 
different to praise, 282 ; and 
see 44, 72, 76, 95, 97, 133, 180, 
201, 202, 285, 288, 291, 293, 
294 

" Loves and Heroines of the 
Poets, The," Stoddard's, 254 

Lowell, James Russell, 89-105 ; 
on English poetry, 90-98 ; 
Stoddard on his poetry, 98- 
loi ; letter to Poe, loi, 102; 
Taylor's admiration of, 102 ; 
on Mrs. Stoddard's Stories, 
104, 105; and see 133, 270, 
285, 310 

Lowell, Mrs. James Russell, 103 

"Lucy," Wordsworth's, 172 

Macaulay, 199 

Macready, William Charles, 24 

Maginn, William, 77 

Mail and Express, The, 307, 

309 
" Marco Bozzaris," Halleck's, 

162, 172, 173 
McClellan, General George B., 

308 
" McFingal," Trumbull's quota- 
tion from, 13 
Mellen, Grenville, 161 
Melville, Herman, 142-144 
Milton, quotation from, 93 ; 
Boker on, 186, 188, 190; and 
see 150 
Mirror, The, 25, 81, 83 
Mirror Library, The, 26 
" Miss Kilmansegg and her Pre- 
cious Leg," Hood's, 171 



328 



INDEX 



"Moan, ye wild winds, around 
the pane/' Taylor's, 65 

" Mogg Megone," Whittier's, 
2S8 

Moliere, 155 

Moore, Thomas, 84,87, 167, 211, 
246 

Morris, George P., personal ap- 
pearance, 87 ; and see 26, 44, 
81, 173 

Neal, John, y6 

" Ned Buntline." Sqq /udson. 

New England Life, Bryant's 

pictures of, 227-232 
New World, The, 25, 32, 43, 45 
New York, Early days of, 17-29, 

151, 168, 169, 174, 236, 237 
North American Review, The, 

167 

O'Brien, Fitz James, 248 

" Ode to Shelley," Taylor's, 56 

''Old Manse, The," 117, 132, 

133 
" Opium Fantasy, An," Mrs. 

Lowell's, quotation from, 103 
Osgood, Frances Sargent, 145, 

153.154 

" Pencillings by the Way," 

Willis's, 83 
" Penelope," Stedman's, 264 
" Peter Parley." See Goodrich. 
Pfaff's, 266 

" Phantom, The," Taylor's, 65 
Philadelphia, a literary centre, 

190 
*' Philip," Melville's, 143 
Pierce, Franklin, 117, 135, 136 
Pierpont, John, 15, 16, 76, 167 
Poe, Edgar Allan, 145-160; per- 
sonal appearance, 147 ; unjust 
treatment of Stoddard, 148- 

3 



150; literary New York, 152 ; 
methods of work, 153, 154; 
his bitter enmity, 154; his 
masters, 155; egoism, 155; 
devotion of his mother-in-law, 
Mrs. Clemm, 157-160; and see 
43, loi, 102, 310 

Poe, Mrs. Edgar Allan, 147, 152 

" Poems, Lyrical and Idyllic," 
Stedman's, 264 

" Poems of Home and Travel," 
Taylor's, 56 

" Press on," Benjamin's, quota- 
tion from, 47 

Procter, Bryan Waller (" Barry 
Cornwall"), 84, 176 

Putnam, George P., 60 

Read, Thomas Buchanan, 
201-212; encouraged by Long- 
fellow, 202 ; his twin gifts, 202, 
203; departure for Europe, 
204, 205 ; home at Borden- 
town, 205-212; and see 58, 
270 

Read, William B., reminiscences 
of Thackeray, 219, 220 

Redding, Cyrus, 175 

Ripley, George, 60 

Robbins, Reverend Thomas, 109 

Rogers, Samuel, 268 

Rover, The, 35, 36 

Rynders, Captain Isaiah, 140, 
141 

" Sacrifice of Abraham," 

Willis's, 73 
Sands, Robert C, 76, 161, 237 
Sargent, Epes, 25, 43, 61 
Sartain, John, 154 
Sartaiji's Magazine, 185 
Saturday Afterftoon, Willis's, 16, 

68, 69, 72, 78 
Savage, John, 142 

29 



INDEX 



Savage, Reverend Minot J., 314 

Saxe, John Godfrey, 180 

Scott, 71, 167, 184 

Scribner, Charles, Senior, 264 

Sedgwick, Catherine, 76 

'•'Shadow, The," Stoddard's, 
quotation from, 296, 297 

Shakespeare, Bokeron, 186, 188, 
190, 194, 196; andsee3i, 94, 
150, 177, 184, 199, 219, 225 

Shelley, Taylor's admiration of, 
56 ; Lowell on, 96 ; Stoddard 
on, 96, 97 ; and see 77, 310 

" Shepherd of King Admetus, 
The," Lowell's, 103 

Sidney, Sir Philip, 199 

Sigourney, Lydia H., 76, 161 

Simms, William Gilmore, no 

" Skylark, The," Shelley's, 96 

Smith, Seba, kindness to Stod- 
dard, 35-37 

Southey, -j"], 167 

Spenser, 186, 199, 310 

Sprague, Charles, 268 

Stael, Madame de, 210 

Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 
261-269; early poems attract 
attention, 261-263; admira- 
tion of Tennyson, 264; at 
Yale, 265 ; marriage, 265 ; on 
the staff of the Tribune, 266, 
267 ; war correspondent on 
the World, 267; his Bull Run 
letter, and '' Alice of Mon- 
mouth," 267, 268 ; his " Vic- 
torian Poets," 269 ; address at 
Stoddard's burial, 318-320; 
and see 270, 293, 306, 30S 

Stimson, Dr. Daniel M., Stod- 
dard's devoted physician, 308 
Stoddard, Elizabeth Barstow, 
literary ability recognized by 
Lowell, 104, 105; 106-115; 
ancestry, 106-108 ; girlhood 



and education, 108-110; court- 
ship and marriage, 11 2-1 14; 
begins to write, 114; birth of 
first child, 115; "The Mor- 
gesons " praised by Haw- 
thorne, 130, 131 ; life with the 
Taylors, 251-258 ; Longfellow 
on, 279, 280 ; 295-301 ; birth 
of second child, 295 ; her 
stories of New England life, 

296, 298 ; death of first born, 

297, 298 ; birth of Lorimer, 
299 ; home in Fifteenth Street, 
300, 301 ; last years and death, 
305, 306; and see 244, 313, 
316,318,319 

Stoddard, Lorimer, 299, 306, 

Stoddard, Richard Plenry, an- 
cestry, I, 2; father's death, 
3 ; childhood in New England, 
3-16; residence in Boston, 
12-16; mother's second mar- 
riage and kindness of step- 
father, 14 ; begins his life in 
New York, 17 ; various em- 
ployments of his boyhood, 22- 
27 ; meets Ingraham and *' Ned 
Buntline," 24 ; at eighteen en- 
ters iron foundry, 27, 28 ; 
reads the English poets, 30, 
31 ; his first poem published 
in The Rover, 35 ; first lit- 
erary acquaintances — Seba 
Smith and Rev. Ralph Hoyt, 
35-41 ; encouraged by Park 
Benjamin, 43-47 ; writes for 
the Kjiickerbocker, 47, 49, 
iSo, i8i ; acquires skill in 
writing, 48 ; assisted by Mrs. 
Kirkland, 50, 51 ; friendship 
with Bayard Taylor, 51-67 ; 
an intellectual stimulant, 56; 
imitation of Keats, 56, 150; 



330 



INDEX 



competes for Jenny Lind 
prize, 60-62 ; impressed by 
Willis's poetry, 68-70 ; on his 
literary career, 72-88 ; visits 
Lowell, 89-98 ; on his poetry, 
98-roi ; publishes " Foot- 
]:)rints," iii ; meets Elizabeth 
I'arstow; 112; courtship and 
marriage, 113, 114; teaches 
himself to write prose, 114; 
birth of first child, 115; ac- 
quaintance with Hawthorne, 
116-133; visits "The Way- 
side," 1 17-122; early life re- 
sembles Hawthorne's, 125; 
pubhshes "The King's Bell," 
129; Hawthorne's comments 
on, 129, 130; assisted by Haw- 
thorne to enter the Custom- 
House, 126-128 ; visits Wash- 
ington and has audience with 
the President, 136; life in the 
Custom-House, 136-144 ; help- 
ful friendship of James L. 
Benedict, 138; dropped from 
the Custom-IIouse, 138; at- 
tends a Tammany ball, 140, 
141 ; acquaintance with John 
Savage and Melville, 142, 143; 
Poe's unfair treatment of, 146- 
150; on Poe's methods, 153, 
154; calls on Mrs. Clemm, 
157-160; on Halleck, Drake, 
and "The Croaker Papers," 
161-179; occupation similar 
to Halleck's, 174; Ode on 
Lincoln, 177 ; attends Hal- 
leck's funeral, 178, 179 ; lack 
of education a drawback, 182 ; 
Roker's letters and their as- 
sistance to, 183-197 ; on Boker, 
198, 199; on Read's talents, 
201-203; sees him off for 
Europe, 204, 205 ; visits him 



33 



at Bordentown, 205-212; on 
Thackeray, 214, 219 ; meet- 
ings with him, 221-225 ; on 
Bryant and his literary work, 
226-240 ; personal acquaint- 
ance with him, 240-243 ; on 
Taylor and his poetry, 245- 
247 ; their home together, 
251-258; publishes "Life of 
Humboldt " and " Loves and 
Heroines of the Poets," 253, 
254 ; celebrates Taylor's forti- 
eth birthday, 259, 260; on Sted- 
man's early poetry, 261-264; 
first meeting with him, 263 ; 
a visit to Longfellow, 272-274 ; 
some letters from him, 276- 
284; on Whittier, 285-290; 
attends his seventieth birth- 
day breakfast, 290-292 ; some 
letters from Whittier, 293, 
294 ; birth of second child, 
295 ; death of first born, 297, 
298 ; on Mrs. Stoddard's 
novels, 298 ; poetry his best 
work, 299 ; publishes " Ad- 
ventures in Fairyland " and 
" Town and Country," 299 ; 
birth of Lorimer Stoddard, 
299 ; home in Fifteenth Street, 
300, 301 ; last years, 305-313 ; 
death and funeral services, 
313-317 ; burial, 318-320 ; bib- 
liography, 321 

Stoddard, Willy, birth of, 115; 
death of, 297, 298; and see 
295 

Swinburne, 274, 275 

"Talisman, The," 76 

" Tanglewood Tales," Haw- 
thorne's, 127 

"Task, The," Cowper's, 92, 
249 

I 



INDEX 



Taylor, Bayard, 50-67 ; first 
meeting with Stoddard, 51-53; 
literary work, 54; happy Sat- 
urday nights with Stoddard, 
54-58 ; admiration of Shelley, 
56 ; starts for California, 59 ; 
wins Jenny Lind prize, 59, 60 ; 
sickness and death of first 
wife, 62-65 ; sails for Europe, 
66 ; juvenile verse in Home 
Journal, 86; preference for 
Lowell, 102 ; friendship with 
Boker, 180-183, 187 ; break- 
fast to Thackeray, 222-225; 
returns from Europe, 244; 
poetry compared to Byron's 
and Moore's, 246, 247 ; life 
with the Stoddards, 251-258; 
fortieth birthday, 259, 260; 
and see 83, 159, 178, 200, 201, 
203, 204, 305, 306 

Tennyson, Boker on, 189, 190 ; 
Stedman's admiration of, 264 ; 
and see 77, 99, 175, 186, 

275 

Thackeray, 213-225 ; personal 
appearance, 215 ; popularity 
in America, 216 ; liking for 
the Century Club, 217, 218 ; 
Press dinner to, 221 ; enter- 
tained by Taylor, 222, 223 ; on 
Dumas's novels, 224, 225 ; and 
see 177, 310 

" Thanatopsis," Bryant's, the 
dawn of American poetry, 
235, 236; and see 167, 240 

Thomson, James, 31, 92 

Ticknor, 116, 271 

" Token, The," 76 

** Town and Country," Stod- 
dard's, 299 

Tribune, The N. Y., 51, 52 

Trumbull, John, 13, 167 

Turner, William, 75 



" Tyre," Taylor's, 
from, 247 



quotation 



" Ulysses," Tennyson's, 99, 264 
Underwood, Francis H., editor 

Atlantic Mo?ithly, 294 
Union Magazine, The, 50, 53 

Verplanck, Gulian C, 76, 

237 

"Victorian Poets, The," Sted- 
man's, 269 

" Views Afoot," Taylor's, 50 

Wallace, General Lew, 25 
Ward, Artemus, 29 
Washington, George, 6, 20 
Watts, Alaric A., 75 
Watts, Dr. Isaac, 5, 69 
" Wayside, The," 116-121 
Weems, Mason L., 20 
Whipple, Edwin P., 116, 271, 

272 
Whipple, Colonel T. J., 117, 

119. 13s 

Whitman, Walt, 266 

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 285- 
294 ; heredity, 285 ; hatred of 
oppression, 286; Indian verse, 
288 ; balladry, 289 ; ethic ele- 
ment in his verse, 290; sev- 
entieth birthday breakfast, 
290-292 ; some letters from, 
293, 294; and see 163 

Willis, Nathaniel Parker, popu- 
larity and reputation, 16, 43, 
44 ; 68-88 ; influence of, 68- 
70 ; career has brilliant be- 
ginning, 70, 71 ; early poems 
create sensation, 71; literary 
work in Boston, 72-80 ; com- 
pared with Bryant, 73; connec- 
tion with Goodrich, 74-76; 



332 



INDEX 



success of Scripture poems, 77, 
78 ; versatility, 79 ; emigration 
to New York, 80 ; on staff 
N. Y. Mirror, 81-83; pro- 
genitor Special Correspond- 
ent and Interviewer, 83-85 ; 
his Continental letters com- 
pared with journalism of to- 



day, 85 ; editor Ho7ne Jcnirfial , 
86-88 ; and see 62, 63, loi 
Woodworth, Samuel, 80, 81 
Wordsworth, 77, 167 
World, The N. Y., 267, 307 

" Year's Life, A," Lowell's 
first book, 98, 99 



333 



OCT 13 1903 



OCT, V'i liv 



OCT 17 1903 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 

015 971 863 3 



